Sub R4 microcontrollers for IoT devices and nodes

28 October 2020 DSP, Micros & Memory

In the prevalent era of IoT technology, a local company, Climax Electronics, has been evaluating low-cost microcontrollers for IoT devices/nodes over the past year in its R&D; department. These single-processor and multi-processor microcontrollers are ‘constrained’ devices in that they have minimal memory and on-board peripherals, but are suitable for many applications where monitoring sensors, controlling actuators, signal processing, control logic and HMI (human machine interface) can be offloaded from the main communications used in hardware for IoT solutions.

By having a modular approach to designing IoT hardware and writing firmware, these low-cost microcontrollers are highly suitable for niche and/or high-volume applications, whereby the only thing needed to make them an IoT device is by adding some form of communications and protocol.

The firmware is developed in C or assembly language and the R&D; department is continuously building on its in-house library of software functions to make application development quicker and easier for proof of concept (POC) ideas for the hardware in end-user IoT devices/nodes.

The microcontrollers are available in OTP (one-time programmable) and Flash for code storage, secure and unmarked to protect IP (alleviating reverse engineering), and giving the end user the option to mark the ICs with their own branding; an alternative to custom FPGA/ASIC technology. Development tools include ICE (in-circuit emulation) and a programmer (suitable for factory automation programming) for single- and multi-processor microcontroller variants.

For further information contact Climax Electronics, +27 79 888 7981, www.fog-iot.com

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