Silicon Labs has launched its first family of wireless SoCs that meet ultra-low-power requirements for battery-free, energy-harvesting applications. The new xG22E family of wireless SoCs are comprised of the BG22E, MG22E and FG22E series for building Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), 802.15.4-based or proprietary 2.4-GHz wireless devices for battery-optimized and battery-free devices that can harvest energy from external sources in their environments like indoor or outdoor ambient light, ambient radio waves, and kinetic motion.
Ambient IoT is a growing trend in the IoT space addressing the challenges of battery replacement and battery dependence and refers to connected devices powered by energy harvesting from ambient sources. Silicon Labs said it has opened the door to new sustainable use cases in wireless IoT like Bluetooth asset tracking, agriculture and factory equipment monitoring.
(Source: Silicon Labs)
The xG22E family targets smart home applications including doors, switches, sensors and appliances as well as gaming electronics and remote controls. They also can be used in commercial and industrial applications, such as electronic shelf labels, asset tracking, smart sub-metering, factory automation and monitoring, agriculture and tire pressure monitor sensors as well as smart building switches and sensors.
All three multiprotocol SoCs, called Silicon Labs’ most energy-efficient SoCs to date, address one of the biggest challenges around ambient IoT, which is “creating a platform that can optimize its energy consumption and prolong its lifespan,” the company said. These devices can communicate over Bluetooth LE, proprietary 2.4-GHz, Zigbee and Zigbee Green Power.
The xG22E family offers several features that are designed to reduce energy consumption. These features include low-energy cold start, deep sleep swift wake-up, power-efficient energy mode transition and several deep sleep wake-up options.
The ultra-fast, low-energy cold start targets applications starting from a zero-energy state to transmit packets and then rapidly return to sleep. An xG22E device wakes up in only 8 ms and uses only 150 micro-Joules (µJ), or roughly 0.003% of the energy needed to power a 60-watt equivalent LED lightbulb for one second, the company said.
The deep sleep swift wake-up reduces wake-up energy by 78%, consuming 16.6 µJ in wake-up energy, compared to other Silicon Labs devices, and the multiple deep sleep wake-up options, such as RFSense, GPIO and RTC wake-up sources from the deepest EM4 sleep mode, are suited for extended storage. EM4 wake-up is less than 1.83 ms.
The power-efficient energy mode transition smoothly transitions between energy modes by mitigating current spikes or inrush, which can harm energy storage capacity, Silicon Labs said.
Key specs of the new family include a high-performance 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33 with DSP instruction and floating-point unit for efficient signal processing with up to 76.8-MHz operating frequency, up to 512-kB flash program memory and up to 32-kB RAM data memory. Other features include a wide voltage range of 1.71 to 3.8 V and up to 125°C operating temperature. Security features include Secure Vault Base (true random number generator, secure boot and crypto engine) and Arm TrustZone. They also offer a wide selection of peripherals.
Partnership completes energy-harvesting solution
Silicon Labs also announced its partnership with e-peas, a provider of power management ICs (PMICs) for energy harvesting. Through this partnership, Silicon Labs and e-peas co-developed two energy harvesting shields for Silicon Labs’ new xG22E Explorer Kit.
xG22E Explorer Kit (Source: Silicon Labs)
The xG22E Explorer Kit allows developers to customize the peripherals and debugging options to best match their applications. It also enables highly accurate measurements to better build their applications and devices with the energy harvesting shields, which are each tuned and optimized for different energy sources and energy storage technologies.
One of the shields uses e-peas’ latest AEM13920 dual-harvester, which allows it to pull energy simultaneously from two different energy sources without sacrificing energy conversion efficiency. These sources include indoor or outdoor light, thermal gradients and electromagnetic waves. The second shield is based on e-peas’ AEM00300 shield, and is dedicated to harvesting power from random pulsed energy sources.
The xG22E SoCs are housed in QFN32 (4 × 4 mm) and QFN40 (5 × 5 mm) packages, with 18 and 26 GPIOs, respectively. They are pin compatible with xG22 and xG26 SoCs for easy migration. General availability is expected in June 2024. Silicon Labs is hosting a Tech talk on unboxing the xG22E on May 9. For more information or to register, click here.
Advertisement
Learn more about Silicon Labs
