Tech News: Arduino & Qualcomm

Posted under Educational, Tech Explained on October 12th, 2025 by

Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard this week that Qualcomm announced it will acquire Arduino. I have mixed feelings about it. Probably one of the most celebrated Open source companies gets bought by one of the most closed source hardware chip company ever!

It says Arduino keeps its brand, tools, and open-source mission. But knowing Qualcomm, I don’t have high hopes. They technically have been one of the worst offenders when it comes to putting detailed specs of devices out there. Their documentation is poor, it is always under NDAs, and they have this unspoken rule of not responding to folks who have a non-business ID when you reach out via mails. I desperately hope they prove me wrong this time with Arduino.
Along with this news, they also shipped an Arduino UNO form factor board “UNO Q”. It has a Debian-running Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 application processor with an STM32U585 microcontroller for doing the low level IO. You get 2 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.1(WCBN3536A – Qualcomm Chip), and video output over USB-C. Processor-wise, performance seems to be in the RPi-3 range of things. It’s supposed to be in the “AI for Edge” specific applications. QRB2210 has quad-core 2.0 GHz A53 CPU, Adreno GPU and Dual Camera ISP so can be good for Robotics and Vision IoT stuff. But not sure if it’s a right move when RPi already dominates this range.

It seems to have a new software IDE called Arduino AppLab which is a hybrid for doing Python development for the DragonWing and Arduino sketches for the STM32. Will need to try it out once the board arrives. Anyway, I checked the website documentation, schematic of the board is available (Layout Gerber is available but not the design files). As usual, nothing on the Qualcomm chip used on the board. Hopefully they make this chip atleast available to the public.
 
I just long for a day when I can read up and buy a single unit Qualcomm chip from a reseller without signing an NDA or reaching out to a sales rep. Then I will believe that this acquisition was different!  

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Tech News: 47µF on 0402

Posted under Back to Basics, Educational, Tech Explained, Technology on September 28th, 2025 by

I found this while browsing the interwebs and thought it’s cool enough to do a small post. It’s a reasonably big deal, no-one seems to be discussing much on.

When selecting decoupling capacitors, you would ideally want to have the largest capacitor value in the smallest form factor to keep ESL/ESR in check. Capacitor manufacturer Murata claims that they have started the production of 47µF capacitors on a 0402 form factor(1mm x 0.5mm) design. Usually you don’t get these very large capacitor values in these small sizes. I am also hearing that, Samsung and Kyocera also have made the same 47µF in the 0402, but they in early R&D and production slated to start later this year.Previous largest in the same size was 22µF.
Why this matters is cap placement. 0402 lets you put serious capacitance values right next to power pins and BGA breakouts, which cuts loop inductance drastically. This means the Power Delivery Network is stable with these capacitors acting as the local energy reservoirs. Expect roughly 60% less mounting area than a 47µF 0603 part. This means you can have multiple of these caps in the same area. Meaning in phones, wearables, and AI server boards, around VRMs and GPU substrates, tighter placement can replace a chunk of mid-bulk caps and reduce the number of vias to ground. 
Murata caps seem to be X5R Class-II type with a rated voltage of 2.5V. So these are good for only 0.7 – 1.8 V rails. But the problem can be the DC bias. At the actual full DC voltage, capacitor value will be much lower as it’s a Class-II ceramic material. I tried to see if there are charts on Murata Simsurf tool, but they don’t seem to list these latest caps. So we need to wait till those are available for the general public.

But this is a good sign anyway. We will have the possibility of much bigger capacity caps for strong decoupling pretty soon. Keep a lookout for these in the future board designs.
Part Numbers: GRM158R60E476ME01D, CL05X476MS6N9W

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