Texas Instruments chip has everything for a Wi-Fi IoT

The Texas Instruments CC3200 SimpleLink Wi-Fi chip has everything an engineer needs for a complete wireless IoT product. It has an 80-MHz Cortex-M4 with 256 Kbytes of SRAM and an external ROM loader — all for your applications. For the wireless side of things there’s a network processor that completely offloads Wi-Fi and Internet protocols for the 802.11 b/g/n radio with MAC, and Wi-Fi driver, yielding up to 20 Mbits/s data transfer. All this ensures the chip is wonderfully easy to integrate into an IoT system. 

The chip also has a full hardware crypto engine, plus an 8-bit parallel camera interface. All this in one package that takes, in hibernate mode, only 4 µA. In receive it will need 59 mA and transmit requires about 229 mA. The offloading of the wireless functions and the software tools, and $30 evaluation kit that goes with the chip, make this a really compelling product. Note that is not intended for general Wi-Fi use. It’s really intended for a brilliant IoT application, with lower data rates and lower power. This device is also the first to achieve Wi-Fi Alliance certification. The CC3200 starts at $7.99 ea/1,000 units.