“IoT applications have many limitations, including power consumption, computing power, battery life, product life and cost, etc. How to pass information out through limited resources and effective links is the direction that needs to be considered today.” Matt Saunders, vice president of marketing and applications for Silicon Labs' IoT business group, said in a recent media interview.
Saunders said that the platform strategy is needed to expand the scale of IoT applications. For the product, there are a few key points, including ease of development and deployment, flexibility, reliability, maintainable RF connectivity, and product lifecycle issues. For the platform, a powerful and reliable software framework, the most efficient connection (wireless SoCs and modules), and easy upgrades and cloud connectivity are required.
The second generation of Wireless Gecko platform from Silicon Labs is to bring the Internet of Things to a new generation of wireless connectivity. Series 2 supports mainstream IoT protocols including Zigbee, Thread, Bluetooth LE, Z-wave and Wi-Fi. Initial products include small-sized SoC devices with dedicated security cores and on-chip radio.
It is understood that the Series 2's first SoC EFR32xG21 has been introduced to the market. Saunders pointed out that it has a multi-protocol and multi-band combination, and upgraded the kernel from the first generation of the Arm Cortex-M4 to the Arm Cortex-M33, which greatly improved its performance and doubled its speed. In addition, the EFR32xG21 is a SoC designed for line-powered IoT products in a 4mm x 4mm QFN32 package, which makes it even smaller. In contrast, the first generation of products used a 5mm × 5mm package.
It is worth mentioning that Series 2 also has multiple security protection capabilities, in addition to hardware encryption, it also has a true random number generator (TRNG), secure boot, and security debugging / debug access control and other protection measures, It enables multi-level security protection solutions to be developed, reducing users' concerns about information security.
In the field of Internet of Things, each device manufacturer has different ecosystem standards, including BLE mesh, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, and so on. Silicon Labs said it wants to help companies set standards together. As a chip supplier, Silicon Labs embraces all the protocols and all the standards, and says that all they have to do is standards-compliant, because Only standards-compliant can be interconnected.
