A fine wireless portfolio
28
Feb
2017
We are looking at Silicon Labs’ wireless portfolio this month. Apart from the cute names of the families, Silicon Labs does a fine job of covering the Cortex-M / RF space.
On an unrelated note, with the Europe’s Embedded World and Mobile World Congress taking place, one would expect a number of new announcements from the microcontroller suppliers next month. We’ll check in as usual.
In all, 14 parts were removed this month on the AVR side (ATTiny and ATMega).
The DA14581-00000VRA appeared this month. A silicon revision of the DA14581?
No change this month.
Microchip activated more than 130 new part numbers in their system, although most of them are packaging and +85°C or +125°C options of a few fundamental dice. Included are the PIC16F15324 and the low-voltage LF part at the higher end of Microchip’s 8-bit line, featuring 7K x 14b of Flash, their Intelligent Analog with 10-bit A-to-D, numerous PWMs, XLP (eXtreme Low-Power), and pin counts around 14. Also new is the PIC16F15344 (and LF) with extra A-to-D channels taking up 20 pins.
MCHP also added the new PIC18F24K42 which resolves A-to-D to 12-bits on 24 channels with some local processing capability, DMA, and 1M/1K pairing of Flash/SRAM on-chip (doubling the memory on the ’F25 versions that were added), while using the extended 16-bit PIC18 instruction set. Over 50 of the ’F24, ’F25, ’LF24, and ’LF25’s were added in a variety of package options. BTW, there will be a test covering the 785-page-long datasheet at the end of this newsletter.
No change this month.
No change this month.
For the size company it is, NXP had little change this month – perhaps in a waiting pattern to see how the Qualcomm blending will move. The NXP web site is rather difficult to navigate in any case – as though the previous big corporate merger never fully resolved. NXP did add a few of the 180 MHz Cortex-M4-based LPC54600 family chips that include Ethernet, CAN, and both high- and full-speed USB, plus optional AES hardware. A low-end 20-pin Cortex-M0-based LPC822 appeared, while fifteen low-end LPC541xx parts disappeared.
No change this month.
We are initiating coverage on the Cortex-M wireless portfolio this month. 197 parts constitute one of the richer RF Cortex-M portfolios we have looked at with all the needed SDK, wireless stacks and reference designs. There is quite a diversity not only of protocols (ZigBee, ZigBee RC, Thread, BlueTooth Smart, RF4CE, Wireless M-Bus and proprietary) but also of cores from M0+ to M3 and M4 while flash ranges from 32 to 512 kB and frequency from 24 to 48 MHz.
Silicon Labs partition their portfolio by protocol.
Bluetooth is served by the Blue Gecko with 21 Cortex-M4-based parts ranging from 128 to 256 kB of Flash.
We don’t cover Wi-Fi since those products are modules.
ZigBee and Thread are covered with the Mighty Gecko. There are 16 parts with 256 kB of Flash, of which a few can serve both the 2.4GHz and the sub-GHz bands. The Mighty Gecko supports Bluetooth as well. That segment is also serviced by a somewhat older Cortex-M3 family the Ember – which Silicon Labs acquired in 2012.
The picture wouldn’t be complete without the proprietary protocol segment. The aptly-named Flex Gecko covers the 2.4GHz spectrum while the EZR (Easy Radio?) brings over 110 parts for the sub-GHz side.
Finally, Silicon Labs provides support for the WM-Bus, a European standard for utilities to remotely read meters, with the EZR.
On a behind-the-curtain note, there were a few quirks along the way… Some of the datasheets are not exposed on the site due to an erroneous URL. The EZR32HG320 looks promising, but it points to the EZR32HG230 datasheet. On the Bluetooth front (EFR32BGxxxxF256GJ43), there appears to be a CSP package (J43 suffix), but it is summarily described in the datasheet. It likely has an effect on the GPIO count, but no avail. The Mighty Gecko also has some wonky parts numbers not detailed in the datasheet, like the EFR32MG1xy32F256M32 where y is 6 or 7: some secret sauce parts with a proprietary protocol?
Oh well, the world is not perfect but Daniel Cooley might read us and help fix it.
A handful of products appeared this month in the CY8C4024 family.
ST Micro was pretty busy the first of the year. ST is rolling out the lower end of its sophisticated, memory-rich Cortex-M7-based MCUs this month, adding well over two dozen varieties of the’F722/732’s containing CAN and USB OTG (and ’F723/733’s with the PHY), but without the higher-end’s Ethernet. Also, a handful of tape-and-reel wrappings were added to some Cortex-M0, -M3, and -M4 F-series parts.
Nearly a hundred of ST’s low power L-series ARM microcontrollers showed up new on February’s listings. Almost 20 of the ultra-low-power Cortex-M0+’s joined about 70 new -M3’s, all clocking in at 32 MHz, a third of those merely tape-and-reel rolls. These slower parts have Flash in the vicinity of 64KB. A handful of new 80 MHz Cortex-M4’s appeared on ST’s site.
All tolled, 134 new parts came onto ST’s books, mostly -40° to +85°C, while one-fifth are rated for +105°C.
Only minor changes this month at TI.
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