Every year, Nuremberg, Germany becomes the epicenter for embedded technology with all of the industry’s most influential players coming together to roll out new products, announce game-changing collaborations, and show off innovative solutions. Last week’s conference featured more than 1,100 exhibitors from 52 countries and many use Embedded World as a platform to communicate new critical developments for their businesses to the 32,000+ trade visitors and 2,200 conference participants.
Best of Show
VDC Research created and named the “Embeddy” Awards to highlight companies announcing important advances in the embedded industry. Award nominees are evaluated on specific criteria: corporate, technological and industry significance, with the selection of an overall “Best-of-Show” winner for the most cutting-edge hardware and software products or services.
VDC awarded our hardware “Embeddy” for Best of Show to Texas Instruments for its new bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonator technology. For the past few decades, electronic computing system “heartbeats” (clock signals) have depended on the rhythm of oscillating quartz crystals to synchronize various components. Over time, these crystals wear down affecting their accuracy over time – an expensive consideration for many industries deploying long-life IoT and embedded systems. At 100 microns wide, BAW resonators act as a new type of electronic heartbeat and can operate at much higher frequencies than quartz crystals enabling higher systems performance and reliability, with increased immunity to vibration and shock, for moving massive amounts of data through advanced communication networks in industrial and telecommunication applications.
Texas Instruments launched two new products featuring its innovative BAW technology at Embedded World including the world’s first crystal-less MCU, the CC2652RB, and the LMK05318 network synchronizer clock. Preproduction samples of the CC2652RB (which supports Zigbee, Thread, Bluetooth Low Energy, and proprietary 2.4GHz connectivity) are now available through the TI store in a 7-mm-by-7-mm QFN package as well as a SimpleLink MCU-based TI LaunchPad development kit.
The network synchronizer ensures the accuracy of sampled information, leading to fewer bit errors and link impairments for timing semiconductor ICs within 5G nodes and 400-Gpbs transceivers. The new BAW resonators help achieve ultra-low jitter on the output clocks for network synchronizers needed for high-performance, high-bandwidth communications.
“We are honored the launch of our innovative TI BAW resonator technology, including the world’s first crystal-less wireless microcontroller, the CC2652RB, and our breakthrough network clock synchronizer, the LMK05318, has been selected as best-of-show for hardware by VDC Research at embedded world 2019. This revolutionary technology will pave the way for the next generation of industrial and telecommunication applications by improving the way we move and analyze massive amounts of data.” said Ray Upton, vice president of connected microcontrollers at Texas Instruments. “As we look to the future, the ability to adapt to industry trends, anticipate customer needs and adopt new technologies like TI BAW resonator technology will drive the global demand for innovation excellence across multiple industries.”
While Texas Instruments took the Hardware Embeddy award this year, Embedded World 2019 featured a swath of exciting news and announcements we will be covering soon in a VDC View. We will also be highlighting the most interesting trends and ideas from our discussions with dozens of vendors over three full days at the event. Stay tuned!
View the 2019 IoT & Embedded Technology Research Outline.
