Integrated ON Semiconductor® evaluation hardware proves pivotal in home/building automation system development. These Arduino-compatible units are designed to facilitate prototyping work, comprising all the constituent components necessary to create smart home and building automation systems based on KNX communication technology.  (KNX is an open standard (see EN 50090, ISO/IEC 14543) for commercial and domestic building automation).Suitable for use with a wide variety of leading microcontrollers, they can be plugged directly into existing development platforms – enabling projects to be completed in the shortest possible timeframe.

There are three different variants of the NCN5100ASGEVB from ON Semiconductor, which utilise the company’s NCN5110, NCN5121 and NCN5130 KNX certified transceiver ICs respectively. This means that both standard or more sophisticated implementations can be addressed. Each of these transceivers has a pair of high-efficiency DC/DC converters integrated. Focused predominantly on supplying the transceiver and the system MCU, the first DC/DC converter provides a fixed 3.3 V output. In contrast, the output for the second converter is adjustable across a wide range of voltages, covering 1.2 V to 21 V.

This can be employed for powering peripheral parts such as a relay, display or other analogue IOs. Thanks to the industry-leading power delivery capabilities of these transceivers, plus the elevated levels of operational efficiency, with ultra-low bus voltage drop and quiescent current, engineers will be able to explore potential opportunities for KNX in much more power-hungry application scenarios.

For the boards featuring the streamlined NCN5110 analogue front-end, all the timings need to be dealt with by the host microcontroller, while the NCN5121 and NCN5130 versions have extra functionality added. In addition to the PHY, a MAC layer has been incorporated into both transceivers, thereby reducing the software development work involved. Additionally, the high degree of component integration these boards exhibit means that size and bill-of-materials costs are kept to an absolute minimum.

The ON Semiconductor NCN5100ASGEVB evaluation boards are available from RS South Africa and across Sub-Saharan Africa.