Silicon Labs Announces General Availability for Its Low-Cost High-Performance FG23L Sub-GHz Chips
Latest "Series 2" sub-gigahertz parts include a 78MHz Arm Cortex-M33 with DSP and floating-point extensions, 32kB of SRAM, and 128kB flash.
Silicon Labs has announced general availability of its FG23L wireless system-on-chip (SoC) family, its latest "Series 2" sub-gigahertz parts — with developer kits now available and full general availability scheduled for September 30th.
“The FG23L extends Silicon Labs' proven sub-GHz leadership into the high-volume, cost-sensitive segment of the market," claims Silicon Labs senior vice-president for Internet of Things products Ross Sabolcik of the launch. "By delivering the best-in-class combination of range, efficiency, and security at the industry's most competitive price-performance, we're enabling customers to bring more connected devices to market faster and at lower cost than ever before."
The FG23L parts are built around Arm's 32-bit Cortex-M33 microcontroller core running at up to 78MHz and including both floating-point unit and digital signal processing (DSP) extensions, with 32kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 128kB of flash memory. Peripherals include an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that can run at one mega-samples per second (MSps) at 12-bit precision or 76.9kSps at 16-bit precision, two analog comparators, two digital to analog converters, a low-energy sensor interface, three EUSART and one UART bus with the latter doubling as SPI, SmartCard, IrDA, or I2S, two I2C buses, a keypad scanner, integrated temperature sensor, an eight-channel direct memory access (DMA) controller, and up to 23 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins with output state retention and asynchronous interrupts.
The chips also include integrated sub-gigahertz radio modules delivering a claimed link budget ~146dB for up to twice the range of "comparable devices" yet with a low enough power consumption to deliver a claimed 10 years of battery life in common usage scenarios: 4.2mA receive current for 400kbps 4-FSK signals at 920MHz and as low as 25mA transmit at 14dBm on 915MHz rising to 85.5mA for the more powerful 20dBm models. The chip as a whole draws a claimed 26µA/MHz when clocked to 39MHz, half its rated clock speed, and 1.5µA in deep sleep with full RAM retention dropping to 1.2µA with 16kB retained and the real-time clock running from LFRCO.
Finally, the chips include the mid-range implementation of Secure Vault — offering a true random number generator (TRNG), a cryptographic acceleration engine, Secure Boot and Secure Application Boot capabilities, RTSL support, Secure Debug lock and unlock, and an integrated security engine.
Pricing for the new chips starts at $2.05 in single-unit quantities for the 14dB transmission power variant; a developer kit for the same chip is available from Silicon Labs direct at $202. Full availability is scheduled for September 30th, with more information available on the official product page.