Dialog unveils ultra-low-power Wi-Fi SoC

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Dialog Semiconductor PLC recently announced its first Wi-Fi system-on-chip (SoC) released since closing the acquisition of Silicon Motion’s Mobile Communications product line on May 31, 2019. The FC9000 , targeted at battery-powered IoT devices such as smart door locks, video monitoring systems, smart thermostats, and wireless sensors, enables direct connectivity to Wi-Fi networks while typically supporting a battery power lifetime greater than one year.

The new SoC eliminates the challenge of having to pair devices running on Zigbee, Zwave, or Bluetooth with gateways or smartphones to enable connectivity to the cloud, which adds complexity and cost to IoT adoption, said Dialog.

“The FC9000 is a full offload system for Wi-Fi networking, running the end device’s application code alongside its own,” said Dialog. “It does not require an external network processor or microcontroller but can operate alongside a microcontroller if desired.”

Dialog said that the FC9000’s proprietary power-saving algorithms set a new industry power benchmark, allowing it to operate on just a few microamps, which increases overall battery life for end devices. Other features include a separate hardware-accelerated encryption engine that increases the speed of Wi-Fi encryption, such as WPA2-Enterprise and Personal. This support also extends to higher-layer commercial-grade security encryption, such as TLS, for enabling HTTPS website security.

Available in volume production, the FC9000 SoC is available as an SoC or integrated module. Both are Wi-Fi−certified. The modules are also FCC-, IC-, and CE-certified for worldwide operation. The SDK to speed up design implementation comes with 1.6 MB of SRAM on-board memory.