Recently, some leading electronic components provider are introduced their latest technologies at ISSCC 2023. The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is an annual event that provides a platform for these companies to showcase their latest products and technologies, and discuss the latest trends in the industry. The semiconductor manufacturers include Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung, Renesas, Analog Devices, and many others.
Renesas Wireless Power Transmitter Solution
Renesas is the global leading provider of microcontrollers. It presented its advancements in charging technology for mobile devices at ISSCC 2023. During the conference, Renesas describes its single-chip wireless power transmitter solution that measures AC and DC transmitter power for improved accuracy and safety.
This transmitter technology features adaptive zero-voltage switching (ZVS), which reduces electromagnetic interference (EMI) and improves power transfer efficiency. The technology reviews the Qi wireless charging standard and can achieve up to 15W wireless power transfer through a Qi power receiver. Wireless power transfer up to 40W is achieved through the proprietary PRx solution.
Source: Renesas
Adaptive ZVS is one of the key innovations, which ensures that the power MOSFET switches after its drain-source voltage drops to 0V, which reduces switching losses to improve efficiency. Adaptive ZVS technology can operate under wide load conditions and is suitable for half-bridge inverters supplying variable loads. In addition, the technology can reduce EMI by 4 decibels (dB) by reducing the energy converted to electromagnetic noise and improve PTx efficiency by 1.7% or more.
In addition to this, ZVS also helps to prolong the lifetime of power systems, such as large automotive in-car chargers, by automatically calibrating the initial threshold of the comparator. To increase the accuracy and stability of the charging process, thereby providing more control over the delivered power, the system also features a highly programmable pulse width modulation (PWM) generator. It controls the power delivery characteristics of the transmitter to ensure that the device being charged receives the proper amount of power.
The single-chip transmitter (Tx) technology developed by Renesas can directly measure DC and AC power transmission components. This allows for more accurate measurement of transmit power and provides a means to accurately detect mismatches between power transmitter (PTx) and PRx power levels. Additionally, DC and AC coil current sensing can detect small metallic foreign objects trapped between the transmitter and receiver, which could cause the object to heat up and become a safety hazard. The transmitter is equipped with an analog AC coil current sensor and supports up to four transmitting coils to increase the charging area and improve the charging experience for end users.
"With the integration of these innovative technologies, new wireless charging systems are expected to change the way portable devices are charged,” said Filippo Neri, Senior Manager of Electrical Engineering for Renesas’ Mobility Infrastructure and Industrial Power Division, who co-authored the paper. “For example, foreign object detection is a very important safety feature when charging devices wirelessly. We're committed to developing these and other features to deliver fast and safe charging experiences to everyone.”
These technological improvements have been applied to some of the wireless power transmitter ICs currently available from Renesas Electronics.
Renesas SoC for Automotive Communication Gateway
SoCs for automotive gateways must provide high performance to enable new applications such as cloud services, and low power consumption when not in use. It is also necessary to provide a fast CAN response to support instant start. To provide energy-efficient communication technology for secure communication outside the vehicle, Renesas has developed four system-on-chip (SoC) device technologies for in-vehicle communication gateways.
Architecture for dynamically changing the timing of circuit operation
The communications gateway SoC needs to deliver processing performance in excess of 30,000 Dhrystone million instructions per second (DMIPS) when running while maintaining standby power consumption at 2mW or less to preserve battery life. Typically, a high-performance SoC consumes a lot of power in standby mode, while a low-power SoC with little standby power suffers from performance issues. As a result, Renesas has combined a high-performance application system and a control system optimized for ultra-low standby power consumption in a single chip. The new architecture controls power to these two subsystems and varies the timing of circuit operation to achieve the optimal balance between performance and power efficiency.
External Flash Quick Start Technology
Renesas developed partitioning of the base program, initially loading and decrypting only the necessary parts for booting while continuing to load the rest of the program in parallel. This enables a fast CAN response within 50 ms after startup.
Efficient network accelerator with 10 Gbps/W communication efficiency
In order for the electronic control unit (ECU) to be air-cooled and dissipated, the communication gateway SoC must control power consumption to 7W or less. Since computing processing performance of 30,000 DMIPS or higher requires about 6W of power, it is not enough to have only about 1W left for network processing, because the total communication of 10 Gbps needs to use 1W of power to achieve. As a result, Renesas offloaded processing tasks from the CPU to a custom network accelerator, achieving a higher efficiency of 9.4 Gbps/W. The routing method was also switched from TCAM to hash tables in SRAM, increasing the efficiency to 11.5 Gbps/W.
Security Technology to Prevent Communication Interference
Vehicle control is critical to ensuring safety, as is protecting and segregating mission-critical data. All data traveling over the same in-vehicle network would lead to physical intersections and raise safety concerns. Renesas has developed security technology that analyzes incoming SoC data packets. It determines the inclusion of essential data and distributes them to the different paths and control functions within the network accelerator. This prevents interference with data requiring high reliability and protects on-board data communications from various security threats.
These four technologies have been incorporated into Renesas' R-Car S4 in-vehicle communication gateway SoC. With the latest R-Car S4, developers can accelerate the advancement of E/E architectures, enabling secure connections to cloud services while ensuring safe and reliable vehicle control.
Renesas provides innovative and high-performance solutions for automotive, industrial, and IoT applications, contributing to a safer, smarter, and more sustainable future. Renesas Microcontroller ICs are its advance product line for a wide range of applications.