Quectel Unveils the FCM363X, a High-Performance Arm Cortex-M33 Part with Wi-Fi 6, BLE 5.3
Company targets "devices with long lifecycles" with its latest wireless microcontroller, packing a generous 1.2MB of SRAM on-chip.
Quectel has announced the launch of its latest wireless microcontroller, the FCM363X — designed, the company says, for "devices with long lifecycles" in the home and industrial automation and Internet of Things (IoT) sectors.
"We’re excited to launch the Quectel FCM363X Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.3 module," says Quectel president and chief sales officer Norbert Muhrer of the company's latest device. "This compact, high-performance module is ideal for many use cases, especially in the smart homes and industrial IoT categories. We're looking forward to seeing customers adopt the Quectel FCM363X for a broad array of use cases and to take advantage of the module's versatility to optimize their designs."
The Quectel FMC363X is built around an Arm Cortex-M33 processor running at up to 260MHz, linked to a generous 1.2MB of static RAM (SRAM) and 8MB of flash storage — while memory capacity can be expanded with optional pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) if required, the company says. The radio block includes dual-band Wi-Fi 6 1×1 and Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) support, including AES-128 encryption support for WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK, and WPA3-SAE network security.
For peripheral connectivity, the module includes Secure Digital Input/Output (SDIO), USB, UART, SPI, I2C, and I2S buses, includes an LCD interface, and has general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity including an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and pulse-width modulation (PWM) support. Quectel also boasts of a "wide variety of low power consumption modes," along with a "keep-alive mechanism" for optimized lifespan — but had not publicly disclosed full details of these at the time of writing.
The launch comes hot on the heels of Quectel's unveiling of the SG882G "Smart Module," a high-performance system-on-module designed for edge artificial intelligence and powered by Qualcomm's QCS8550 chip — giving it a Kryo CPU with one "Prime" high-performance Arm Cortex-X3 core, four lower-performance cores, and three low-power cores, plus an Adreno 740 graphics processor and a Hexagon Tensor Processor (HTP) delivering a claimed 48 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute.
More information on the FCM363X is available on the Quectel website; the company had not confirmed pricing and availability at the time of writing, but will be showcasing the device this week at Embedded World Stand 3-138.
