GigaDevice Unveils a 160MHz Wi-Fi 6-Capable RISC-V "Combo Wireless" Microcontroller, the GD32VW553
A single 32-bit core is joined by 288kB of dedicated SRAM, up to 4MB of on-chip flash, and a radio which does Wi-Fi 6 and BLE 5.2.
Chinese embedded electronics specialist GigaDevice has announced a new Wi-Fi 6-capable microcontroller family, the GD32VW553 Series Combo Wireless MCU — featuring a processor core based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture.
"The new GD32VW553 series, with its optimized RISC-V open source instruction set architecture, incorporates the microcontroller with advanced 'Combo Wireless' connection protocols," claims GigaDevice's Eric Jin of the company's launch. "This addresses the increasing connectivity demands in the thriving home appliances and emerging AIoT [Artificial Intelligence of Things] market, achieving a balance between processing performance, solution design, and material costs."
The new chips are built around a single Nuclei Sys N307 processor core, a 32-bit RISC-V implementation running at up to 160MHz and with a configurable 32kB instruction cache for improved efficiency. This is combined with 288kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 32kB of shared SRAM and between 2MB and 4MB of on-chip flash memory, depending on model chosen.
The radio side of the chip includes 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 compatibility, in the 2.4GHz spectrum only, with a claimed 60 per cent boost to data transmission rates over the company's Wi-Fi 4 (802.11b/g/n) devices. It also offers Bluetooth 5.2 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, offering a 2Mbps high-speed mode and 125/500kbps lower-energy modes. GigaDevice also promises better reception in noisy environments through a Package Traffic Arbitration (PTA) system and support for the Target Wake Time (TWT) system for improved energy efficiency.
For hardware connectivity, the GD32VW553 includes up to 29 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, three USART, two I2C, one SPI, and one QSPI bus, two 32-bit general-purpose timers, two 16-bit general-purpose timers, four 16-bit basic timers, one advanced timer for pulse-width modulation (PMW) support, and a 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC). The parts run with a 1.8V to 3.6V power input, with 5V tolerance on the IO pins.
More information on the new chips is available on the GigaDevice website; the company has not shared pricing, though its previous RISC-V parts have been priced extremely competitively.