Silicon Labs announced the introduction of Bluetooth system-on-chip (SoC) solutions to meet the market demand for high-volume, battery-powered IoT products. The all-new Bluetooth 5.2 SoC will be delivering superb security features, wireless performance, energy efficiency, software tools, and stacks. The BG22 family offers best-in-class ultra-low transmit and receive power (3.6 mA TX at 0 dBm, 2.6 mA RX), high-performance, low-power Arm Cortex-M33 core (27 µA/MHz active, 1.2 µA sleep) and delivers industry-leading energy efficiency that can extend coin cell battery life up to ten years. The SoC increases the operating temperature to +125 °C and extends flash memory up to 512 kB to support applications requiring direction-finding capabilities or low-power mesh nodes.
Bluetooth mesh low-power nodes, smart door locks, fitness devices and personal healthcare, asset tracking tags, beacons, and indoor navigation, etc. will be benefitted from SoCs' versatile Bluetooth Angle of Arrival (AoA), Angle of Departure (AoD) capabilities and sub-one-meter location accuracy. This will be an expansion of Silicon Labs' secure, ultra-low-power Wireless Gecko Series 2 platform, the EFR32BG22 (BG22). SoCs ensure to provide developers an optimized Bluetooth connectivity solution supporting the new Bluetooth 5.2 specification, Bluetooth direction finding and Bluetooth mesh.
The new portfolio offers a choice of three Bluetooth SoC products for addressing a wide range of price/performance requirements for smart home, consumer, commercial and industrial IoT applications.
- EFR32BG22C112 SoC: It targets high-volume, cost-sensitive applications, providing access to 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps Bluetooth PHYs, a 38.4 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core, 18 GPIOs and 352 kB of flash memory with radio characteristics of 0 dBm transmit (TX) and an industry-leading -99 dBm receive (RX) (1M PHY) sensitivity.
- EFR32BG22C222 SoC: It targets applications requiring more compute power (with a 76.8 MHz M33 core), more I/O's (26 GPIOs) and higher TX power (+6 dBm).
- EFR32BG22C224 SoC: It provides IQ sampling for direction finding applications and access to 125 kB and 500 kB Bluetooth LE Coded PHYs, which can increase RX sensitivity to -106 dBm.
EFR32BG22 SoCs (priced $0.52) in a 5 mm x 5 mm QFN40, 4 mm x 4 mm QFN32 and a slender 0.3 mm x 4 mm x 4 mm TQFN32 package along with EFR32BG22 SoC starter kit (starting price at $19.99 MSRP) and Thunderboard EFR32BG22 evaluation kit are planned to be available in March.
As per the Bluetooth SIG predictions, the total annual Bluetooth device shipments will grow 26 percent by 2023 (from 4 billion units in 2019 to 5.4 billion units), and by the same year, 90 percent of all Bluetooth devices will include Bluetooth Low Energy. Secure connectivity and extremely low power consumption will be the main requirements for these IoT devices. Silicon Labs designed the BG22 SoCs to meet these requirements and growth projections for the billions of Bluetooth-enabled IoT devices.
