Partnership brings low-power semiconductors and processors to Digi-Key Marketplace.
Digi-Key Electronics is expanding its Marketplace product offerings through a partnership with QuickLogic, a fabless semiconductor company that crafts low-power, multi-core semiconductor platforms for AI, voice and sensor processing.
The partnership is in line with a trend of Digi-Key forming relationships to expand its product inventory over the past year. This includes collaborating with Infineon Technologies on a Power Focus campaign to showcase Infineon’s new IGBT7 technology during an October 14 webinar.
The Digi-Key Marketplace currently offers nearly 12 million electronic components from over 1,700 suppliers, delivering electromechanical, automation, testing, IoT, industrial robotics and other tech devices to consumers in one to five days. The partnership with QuickLogic will add to the repertoire of offerings with the company’s range of low-power, multi-core microcontrollers, Field Programmable Gate Arrays including embedded FPGAs, and voice and sensor processing devices.
“Digi-Key offers the world’s largest selection of electronic components,” said Brian Faith, CEO of QuickLogic. “Selling through Digi-Key Electronics broadens access to our products by providing engineers an easy way to order devices, kits, and software tools.”
The addition of QuickLogic’s products, which are supported by open-source software tools such as Zephyr, FreeRTOS, SymbiFlow and Renode, is envisioned to offer customers comprehensive software and hardware ultra-low power solutions. The product offerings enable functions such as always-on wake word detection and AI inferencing at the edge, and include options such as a low-power Arm Cortex-M4F MCU based on open-source software.
QuickLogic’s EOS S3 SoC portfolio includes the EOS S3 MCU Sensor Processing Platform integrated with an Arm Cortex-M4F MCU and an embedded FPGA core facilitating fast progression from ideation phase to mass production. In addition, the product is supported by Zephyr, FreeRTOS and QuickLogic’s FPGA user tools. Another member of the EOS S3 family is the Voice + Sensor Hub that supports concurrent sensor processing with voice recognition, powered by a long-life battery. Finally, the EOS S3-AI is an all-inclusive low-power solution and development environment incorporating AI in endpoint applications.
Other QuickLogic products available on Digi-Key’s Marketplace include the QuickFeather Development Kit and the Qomu Development Kit. QuickFeather is an innovation kit with a Cortex-M4F MCU and integrated eFPGA that works with fully open-source hardware and software. Qomu is a tiny development platform with an extremely low-power embedded processor and equipped with low-power FPGA suited for edge IoT applications, AI and machine learning compatible with USB Type-A ports.
“QuickLogic products are optimized for ultra-low power consumption, making them ideal for IoT and consumer mobile applications,” said Anissa Lauer, senior product manager at Digi-Key. “In addition, the Basic Edition of the Analytics Toolkit from QuickLogic’s subsidiary, SensiML, is already available at Digi-Key. As a result, our customers now have a complete software and hardware solution enabling a more rapid ideation and design process.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to ensnare the global supply chain of electronic components, Digi-Key partnered with Rochester Electronics earlier this year to help bolster its supply of semiconductors and provide guaranteed authentic electronic components as counterfeit sales are on the rise. More recently, Digi-Key struck a partnership with Siemens to offer a broader range of automation and control products for automotive manufacturing, data centers and healthcare, among other sectors.
“E-commerce is one of our fastest-growing industrial automation distribution channels in the U.S., and we’re proud to be launching our new partnership with Digi-Key,” said Marla Davids, vice president of digital industrial sales at Siemens. “Our customers expect greater flexibility and convenience now more than ever, and Digi-Key has the online product selection and unique engineering design tools that are important to their success. With Digi-Key’s special emphasis on new product introductions, we’re looking forward to further growth.”
