MCU integration wireless technology becomes a trend

With the rapid development of processor performance and wireless communication technology, the Internet of things is expected to quickly enter our life in the next few years. As the core component of the Internet of things, microcontroller (MCU) will be further developed in both market scale and technology.
Rapid growth of MCU + wireless
The purpose of the Internet of things is that everything can be networked to form a huge application system and create a smart living environment. Therefore, Internet of things devices are bound to have networking capabilities, taking into account both cost and power consumption. This demand has led to the rise of wireless microcontroller solutions. Many large MCU manufacturers have noticed this trend, began to integrate Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee and other communication technologies into the system on a single chip (SOC), and gradually expanded their product portfolio.
Jin Guangyi, product manager of gigadevice MCU of Zhaoyi innovation, believes that Internet of things applications pose new requirements and challenges to the processing capacity, peripheral configuration and cost price of MCU. More and more Internet of things interconnected applications require MCU to have excellent performance and real-time response speed to realize the processing and transmission of information flow with high efficiency. In addition, the Internet of things also requires MCU to have a large capacity of flash and RAM space, and integrate a rich combination of communication interfaces to meet the resource requirements of the system and multiple peripherals running at the same time. Cost price is an important factor to determine whether Internet of things terminals can be popularized. The interconnected and value-added gd32 Cortex-M3 MCU launched by gigadevice aims at the market demand of these Internet of things and integrates enhanced processing efficiency and highly integrated peripheral configuration. The lowest price is only US $0.32, which is more suitable for cost sensitive embedded interconnection applications.
Greg Hodgson, microcontroller product marketing director of silicon labs, said: "The Internet of things, as its name implies, is the connection between things and the Internet of things. The basic technologies of the Internet of things include sensing, processing and wireless connection. Based on the user's use mode, connectable devices need robust wireless networks based on ZigBee, WiFi, Bluetooth smart and sub GHz technologies. Silicon labs is currently a leading supplier of ZigBee chips and a leading sub GHz IC Supplier. Most semiconductor devices used in connectable device applications are based on mixed signal CMOS technology. These devices (sensors, MCU and wireless IC) must be energy-efficient, low-cost and flexible enough to be suitable for all kinds of IOT applications. "Silicon labs said that" IOT SOC "will be introduced in the future , integrate MCU, wireless transceiver, flash memory and sensor interface in an energy-saving single chip. "This will greatly reduce the cost and complexity of IOT terminal node applications," said Greg Hodgson.
MCU + sensors are the trend
"In view of the growth of connection demand, MCU needs to provide more peripherals to interact with the external analog and digital world; in view of intelligence, MCU needs to obtain information for efficient and intelligent information processing; in view of processing demand, MCU needs to meet the requirements of real-time processing on the one hand and exchange information with remote center on the other hand. These are the requirements of MCU in the era of Internet of things Zhang Xiaoping, technical marketing manager of NXP semiconductor microcontroller products, said, "at the same time, NXP also found the integration trend of MCU and sensors." Cao Jindong, senior manager of MCU market in St China, reminded: "In the Internet of things, in addition to the MCU, another component that can not be ignored is the sensor. The signals that need to be interpreted in the Internet of things need to be captured through the sensor. Without the sensor, the Internet of things will not exist."
However, it is not technically easy to integrate MCU and sensors. Jin Guangyi said that sensor network is an important part of the Internet of things. As the core device of system control, MCU needs to collect and analyze the data of accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, hygrometer and other sensors. The MEMS process and MCU process used by the sensors are different, and the so of the two are different C integration has some challenges in semiconductor technology. "However, it does not prevent the two as independent modules from being widely used in the Internet of things. We are more concerned about the system application scheme itself, that is, how to use the software algorithm of MCU to realize the control of sensors, so as to optimize the process of data acquisition and energy efficiency, and make more effective use of processed data. We are also cooperating with third-party software partners to launch different types of The MCU application software and solution of type a sensor give play to the core advantages of MCU control, "Jin Guangyi said.
Toshiba Electronics (China) Co., Ltd. technology director Yixing Wei believes that Toshiba has been committed to the research of relevant technologies, but at present, China's market lacks unified standards, so it is too early to integrate. However, in the long run, once the standards are unified, integration will be a trend.
Greg Hodgson said: "Sensor technology is developing more rapidly than MCU. When the pace of sensor innovation slows down and sensor types become more standardized, we will see MCU and sensors integrated into SOC or sip solutions. Now, many MCU have mature sensor interface architecture. In the future, we will see the emergence of MCU architecture designed for automatically collecting sensor data, which is developing for IOT Sensor data aggregation is realized on the optimized ultra-low power platform.

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Keyword：MCU   Integrated Wireless Technology   Internet of Things   System Single Chip   Microcontroller   Sensing   Processing   Wireless Connection   SoC   IoT   Commax-Tech Electronic