Since the emergence of SoM (System on Module), there has been an additional resource for agile development in the emerging diversified embedded system design. While helping developers achieve design breakthroughs, SoM has greatly shortened the time to market of products and maintained low cost.
Before that, creating an embedded system is usually a long process, which requires system design based on core MCU or SOC and manufacturing customized circuit boards. SoM reduces these steps and can be deployed by selecting a SoM that meets the system requirements and integrating it into the terminal system. In the process of rapid mass deployment, this Lego-style modular design can simplify the product life cycle management, and reduce the cost of BOM compared with SOC or SIP.
In short, SoM can provide a comfortable and intuitive design environment for software developers without hardware experience, and use its built-in drivers and other software to save design time. Hardware engineers can achieve high performance and flexibility through FPGA on SoM board, and there is no difficulty in PCB design and integration, so as to speed up the progress of completing the project within the budget - especially for SoM that provides pre-built applications.
Not long ago, Rexar Electronics, Elymus and the AIoT solution provider JNCHIP (HONG KONG) jointly launched a heterogeneous SoM series - ProMe. This series of heterogeneous SoMs integrates MCU, FPGA and programmable mixed-signal matrix on the board. According to the function, the ProMe series is divided into three generations. The currently released generation of products integrates Reza MCU RX651 and GreenPAK ™ Programmable analog and digital mixed-signal IC SLG46585M, and easy-to-use FPGA are suitable for system management, version loading, process initialization, system monitoring, interface conversion, data processing and other scenarios.
Figure: The yellow part in the middle is ProMe, only the size of the cap of the mineral water bottle
In general, the features of ProMe include the following aspects:
As the classic MCU of Renesa, RX651 was designed to meet the higher security requirements of industrial automation, building automation and intelligent meter system. The extended microcontroller integrates Trusted Secure IP (TSIP), enhanced reliable flash memory function and human machine interface (HMI) for industrial and network control systems. The RX651 MCU uses the high-performance RXv2 core owned by Reza, with a working frequency of up to 120MHz. Its flash memory can be expanded from 512KB to 2MB, thus storing the FPGA boot image file.
In ProMe, the performance and resources of RX651 include:
GreenPAK ™ The programmable analog and digital mixed-signal IC SLG46585M, in addition to providing combined function macrocells and multi-function macrocells, also reserves four voltage comparators, three GPIOs, and integrates four LDOs and one step-down converter to supply power to MCU and FPGA.
The FPGA on the board of ProMe is based on Quantum by Efinix, Inc ™ The Trion series product T20F169 of the technology has 20K logic resources and extremely low power consumption. 20K logic operates at 100 MHz at full speed, with power consumption less than 200 mW, and has a small size of 9 mm x 9 mm. In addition to supplementing some peripherals with multi-port UART and SPI, it also has design resources for servo control. The specific resources of the device in ProMe are as follows:
Yan Hongxu, general manager of JNCHIP (HONG KONG), said that the company has innovatively put forward the product concept of "hardware that can be updated and upgraded after deployment". Its core is that ProMe SoM is highly optimized chip hardware for specific applications. This optimization is carried out after the hardware manufacturing, and there is almost no limit on the number of repeats. Therefore, the system can adapt to new requirements without installing new hardware. ProMe series heterogeneous SoM replaces the traditional "chip first" development strategy, thus saving a lot of development time. The development time is shorter and the risk of errors in the development process is smaller, which is conducive to accelerating the time to market of products. Developers no longer need to focus on the selection of supporting functional chips, but only need to focus on customer application needs.
In addition, for applications in different scenarios, JNCHIP provides corresponding mainstream software, such as TCON timing, motor debugging, photovoltaic tuning, image processing, interface conversion and other protocol tool libraries, as well as IP of various mainstream industrial Internet communication protocols. Developers can call different functions through cloud tools for application development.
Lai Changqing, president of Renesas Electronics in China, said that with the increasing demand of customers for shortening the time to market of products, the flexibility of devices in development has become increasingly important. Renesas and Infinix Inc, JNCHIP has reached a strategic partnership, which can give full play to their advantages in product research and development, production and marketing, rapidly launch solutions suitable for the needs of Chinese and global customers, and jointly expand the market. The three parties will be committed to providing safe, reliable, convenient and flexible heterogeneous SoM solutions.
Guo Jing, general manager of Efinix, Inc., said that compared with traditional FPGA products, based on Quantum ™ Trion series products based on technology have the characteristics of logic and routing interchangeability, occupy smaller silicon area and lower power consumption under the same resources, and have significant cost and size advantages. Trion series is based on the 40nm technology of SMIC International, with logic density of 4K to 120K logic units (LE), and has embedded RAM module and DSP module, PLL, GPIO, MIPI, DDR, LVDS and other standard interfaces. This series of FPGAs are applicable to video processing, industrial control, medical, mobile, Internet of Things, consumer electronics, as well as the rapidly growing machine vision, computing acceleration, edge computing and deep learning, etc., and have achieved tens of millions of shipments at present.
Zhang Yonghui, director of Infinix, Inc., said that Renesas has a very rich product line, especially the low-power MCU and board-level power management, which have a good system compatibility with the low-power FPGA of Elix. For small capacity FPGA, Renesas MCU can directly complete the FPGA configuration. As an independent design service company, JNCHIP integrates the products of the two companies well in the form of SoM. Let customers directly use SoM in their own products when evaluating and testing.
