Silicon Labs has announced their next-generation Series 3 platform, purpose-built for embedded IoT devices. With a move to the 22 nanometer (nm) process node, new Silicon Labs Series 3 devices will be designed to offer industry-leading compute, wireless performance, and energy efficiency with the highest levels of IoT security architected to the silicon. To help developers and device manufacturers streamline and accelerate product designs, Silicon Labs also announced the next version of their developer tool suite, Simplicity Studio. With support for Silicon Labs' entire portfolio, including Series 3, Simplicity Studio 6 will allow developers to utilize some of the most favored integrated development environments (IDEs) on the market, while giving developers the latest tools to support their continued development on Series 2 as well as Series 3.
Series 3 devices will be able to answer the challenges that the continued acceleration of IoT poses: demands for more processing power at far-edge devices across all IoT applications in key areas including, but not limited to, smart cities and civil infrastructure, commercial buildings, retail and warehouses, smart factories and Industry 4.0, smart homes, personal and clinical healthcare, and the demand for increasingly portable, secure, compute-intensive applications. Series 3 advances Silicon Labs' industry-leading wireless platform:
- More Security and Power Efficiency: Building on Silicon Labs' industry-leading Secure Vault™ technology, the first security package to earn PSA Level 3 certification, Series 3 devices will include all the security features available on Series 2 devices with new enhancements to make them the most secure devices in the IoT marketplace. By targeting critical power points with proprietary improvements, Series 3 is designed to add years to a device's battery life.
- New Levels of Compute: Series 3 will bring more than 100X processing capability, including integrated AI/ ML accelerators for edge devices, enabling consolidation of system processing into wireless SoCs. In other words, with Series 3, with the increases in programmable compute, developers can eliminate MCUs taking up space and adding cost to their systems. This will include cutting-edge digital and analog peripherals enabling higher-performance systems.
- More Scalable: Series 3 will be the only multi-radio IoT platform with a common code base for over 30 products across key wireless protocols including, but not limited to, Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi, Wi-SUN, 15.4, multiprotocol, and proprietary protocols. This will allow developers to use one common set of tools to build applications and program countless devices. In addition, Series 3 will support an extendable, scalable memory architecture, including support for external flash.
Along with the Series 3 hardware, Silicon Labs has also announced Simplicity Studio 6, the latest version of its award-winning application development and productivity tools. Simplicity Studio 6 will bring the latest development tools to the entire Silicon Labs portfolio of devices, including Series 1 and Series 2, will giving developers a bridge to Series 3.
