Bouffalo Lab's BL602 and BL604 Aim to Bring RISC-V Wi-Fi SoCs to the ESP8266 Price Point
32-bit RISC-V cores power these new low-cost IoT SoCs, which include Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy connectivity.
Bouffalo Lab has launched a pair of RISC-V system-on-chips (SoCs) designed for the Internet of Things, and in doing so is targeting the lower-cost end of the market — to the point where surprisingly high-specification parts should cost no more than Espressif ESP8266 modules.
According to details of the launch winkled out by CNX Software, Nanjing-based Bouffalo Lab has announced two key SoC designs: The BL602 and the BL604. Both include a 32-bit processor built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, running between 1MHz and 192MHz depending on requirement, and 277kB of static RAM (SRAM) on-chip.
Both modules include 128kB EEPROM storage, 1 kB eFuse, and optional on-chip embedded flash along with QSPI flash support for external storage. An on-board radio provides Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) and 802.11b/g/n Wi-FI (Wi-Fi 4) connectivity, and peripherals include SDIO 2.0, SPI, two UARTs, I2C, five PWM channels, a 10-bit digital to analogue converter (DAC) and 12-bit analogue to digital converter (ADC), two analogue comparators, and either 16 or 23 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins depending on model.
Information on the parts is largely in Chinese at present, including a software development kit published to the SmartArduino GitHub repository — though the repository's documentation focuses primarily at its use as a tool for for a $5 Doit.am development board built around the BL602 part.
More details are available on the Bouffalo Lab website.