What happened on day two at electronica 2026?
Infineon takes a circuit from solar and asks where else it could work
Solar microinverters were one of the first volume applications for Infineon’s bidirectional gallium nitride switches, and they were the example the company picked for its Power Electronics Forum session in Munich. The question on Wednesday was how far the same approach could go in higher-power equipment, from on-board chargers to data centre supplies.
If you need a switch that carries current in either direction when it’s on and blocks voltage of either polarity when it’s off, one way to build it is to wire two transistors back to back. Infineon’s 650 V CoolGaN device, introduced in May 2025, puts both switching functions on a single die. In a circuit such as a cycloconverter, where those switches control the transfer of energy from a high-frequency AC link to a lower-frequency output, that reduces the number of devices the designer has to fit into the converter. A higher switching frequency can also make the magnetic components smaller, although how much space you get back depends on the losses and how you get the heat out.
One Ethernet pair still leaves a choice of plug
At the Electrical Connectors Forum, Harting’s Kurt Robert Hippler was on the programme to compare Single Pair Ethernet interfaces for different installations, while Phoenix Contact’s Verena Neuhaus and Tim Kindermann focused on getting equipment from different manufacturers to work together. The choice starts with what the cable needs to do. If a sensor has its own supply, it only needs the data connection. If it draws power from the cabinet, a hybrid plug can carry that power alongside the Ethernet pair on separate contacts.
Those hybrid connectors already exist under IEC 63171-7:2023. What Phoenix Contact brought to the discussion was a common pin layout being developed for the second edition of the standard, with the company expecting its first IP20 and M12 connectors using that layout in early 2027. In the meantime, the pin assignments are worth checking at both ends of the cable before specifying the connector.
Fibocom puts the screen, cameras and modem on one module
Fibocom introduced its SC236 on Wednesday with industrial handhelds and payment terminals among the applications it has in mind. In a handheld scanner, for example, the module could take the camera input, run the application that reads the code, show the result on screen and send it over LTE.
The 40.5 × 40.5 × 2.8 mm module runs Android 16 on Qualcomm’s CQ2390M, with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of flash storage and LTE Cat 4. It supports two camera inputs and a 1,920 × 1,080 display at 60 Hz. Fibocom plans to start mass production in Q4 2026 and lists North America as a target market, with a wider regional variant planned.
How much of a car’s processor can you change?
Wednesday’s IAA Mobility programme brought together speakers from BMW, Bosch, Arm, Aumovio and Axelera AI to look at where chiplets might fit into vehicle computing. BMW and Bosch already work together on CHASSIS, a European project looking at chiplet architectures for software-defined vehicles. The idea is that a carmaker could keep parts of a processor design across several models and swap the die that needs more performance.
The catch comes when that replacement goes into the package. It may use the same interface and still change how heat spreads through the stack or how signals behave under load. If swapping one die means repeating much of the qualification work, some of the time saved by reusing the rest of the design disappears.
And finally, a diamond that can find a short circuit
If the only faulty chip you have contains several dies bonded together, cutting into it to find the short can cost you the sample. QuantumDiamonds’ Fleming Bruckmaier was on Wednesday’s Automotive Forum programme with another way to look inside. The company’s microscope uses tiny defects in a diamond crystal to sense the magnetic field generated by current in the chip. From that field it can work out where the current is flowing, leaving the package intact.
QuantumDiamonds quotes a best lateral resolution of 1.4 µm, which depends on how close the sensor can get to the sample. There’s a nice twist to it: the defects that make the diamond useful are the very things that let it find a defect in the chip.
