Espressif's Cost-Reduced ESP32-C2 Hits the Market as the ESP8684, Dev Board Now Available
Priced at 44¢ per chip in 1k-tray quantities, Espressif's answer to the chip shortage crisis is now available to buy — as is its dev kit.
Espressif has launched its promised cost-reduced high-volume ESP32-C2 microcontroller, now available under the ESP8684 name — boasting a wide operating temperature range and up to 4MB of flash storage in a 4×4mm (around 0.16×0.16") package.
Espressif unveiled the ESP32-C2 back in April, having begun work on the part in mid-2021 at what chief executive Teo Swee Ann described as "the start of the Great Semiconductor Supply Shortage, which to a certain extent persists till today." The idea was to revisit the company's earlier ESP32-C3 chip design to reduce the silicon footprint — making it possible to fit more chips on a single silicon wafer, reducing the per-part cost while increasing output.
Now, the promised part has hit the market as the ESP8684. Brought to our attention by CNX Software, the commercialized version of the ESP32-C2 delivers on the company's promise of a fully-featured low-power single-core 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller with integrated WI-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity in a 4×4mm (around 0.16×0.16") package.
As well as the single-core CPU, running at up to 120MHz, the chip includes 272kB of static RAM (SRAM) with 16kB used for cache, 576kB of flash ROM and between 1MB and 4MB of SPI flash memory, a hardware random number generator (RNG), cryptographic accelerator for SHA and ECC, flash encryption and secure boot capabilities, and a power management unit with four low-power modes.
For hardware connectivity, the ESP8684 include fourteen general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, an on-board pulse-width modulation (PWM) controller with six channels, a 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) with up to five channels, integrated temperature sensor, a general direct memory access (GDMA) controller with one transmit and one receive channel, three SPI, two UART, and one I2C master buses, and a 54-bit general-purpose timer, 52-bit system timer, and two watchdog timers.
At the time of writing, Espressif has announced eight modules built around the ESP8684, offering varying numbers of pins and footprints and 1MB, 2MB, or 4MB of flash memory, while the chip itself comes with a claimed operating temperature of -40 to 105°C (-40 to 221°F).
Pricing runs from 44¢ in 1,000-unit quantities for the bare ESP8684H1 with 1MB of flash up to $1.90 for the modules — or $10.50 for the ESP8684-DevKitM-1, which packs an ESP8684-MINI-1 module on a breakout board with micro-USB for programming and power.
More information on the new parts is available on the Espressif website.