Infineon have announced two shields for the Arduino development environment. The RGB LED Lighting Shield (shown left) provides three independent output channels with a DC/DC LED driver stage to give flicker-free control of multicolor LEDs. It is fitted with an XMC1202 microcontroller using a Brightness Color Control Unit (BCCU) to help off-load time-critical events from the Arduino processor. The Shield can be expanded by adding an optional isolated DMX512 interface for stage lighting control and audio nodes or a 24 GHz radar sensor for motion detection.

The DC Motor Control Shield (shown right) can drive two uni-directional DC motors or one bi-directional DC motor. The Shield contains two NovalithIC BTN8982TA fully integrated high-current half-bridge drivers optimized for motor drive applications. Each NovalithIC BTN8982TA chip contains two drivers (one P-channel high-side MOSFET, one N-channel low-side MOSFET) and an integrated driver IC with one logic circuit to control and monitor power. Further features include current sense, slew rate adjustment, dead time generation and protection against over temperature, undervoltage, overcurrent and short-circuit. Interfacing to a microcontroller is via GPIO logic signals. The chip is capable of high-frequency PWM (e.g. 30 kHz) and supports brushed DC motor control up to 250W continuous load (i.e. 12 V / 20 A) with current limiting at 55 A.

Both shields are compatible with the Arduino R3 environment and can also be combined with the Infineon XMC1100 Boot Kit (not shown) which is equipped with a 32-bit microcontroller from the XMC1000family. All XMC1000 products use an ARM® Cortex™-M0 processor.

The shields will initially be available from Farnell element14 and Newark element14. After the end of January 2015 they will also be available from Infineon and its distributors.