Silicon Labs Cuts Costs with the "Lite" BG22L and BG24L Bluetooth Low Energy System-on-Chips
Trimming the specs a little deliver lower-power, lower-cost alternatives to the company's BG22 and BG24 parts.
Silicon Labs has announced new "Lite" variants of its BG22 and BG24 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) system-on-chips (SoCs), the BG22L and BG24L — promising familiar parts but with "application optimized" designs that bring down power draw and cost.
"We know that our customers are always looking for ways to keep pace with the demands of the evolving IoT [Internet of Things] market while reducing costs," claims SiLabs' Ross Sabolcik of the company's latest hardware announcement. "The BG22L and BG24L expand our portfolio to match those customer needs and concerns by providing an optimized set of industry-leading Bluetooth features with our signature IoT capabilities like high RF sensitivity, low power, robust security, and powerful compute."
Designed to sit alongside the company's BG22, the BG22L is built around an Arm Corex-M33F core running at up to 38.4MHz with digital signal processing (DSP) and floating-point hardware, has up to 24kB of static RAM (SRAM), and up to 352kB of flash, along with a Bluetooth 5.4 Low Energy (BLE) radio — down from the main part's 76.8MHz core, up to 32kB of SRAM, and up to 512kB of flash.
The BG24L, meanwhile, is the "Lite" variant of the BG24 unveiled earlier this year, featuring a Cortex-M33F core running at up to 78MHz, up to 96kB of SRAM, and up to 768kB of flash, plus accelerators for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads — again, a reduction in memory from the non-L-suffixed part's up to 256kB of SRAM and up to 1,536kB of flash. The BG24L also includes support for Bluetooth Channel Sounding, introduced last year in Bluetooth 6.0, a feature missing from the BG22L.
The biggest difference between the L-suffix and standard parts is in their security features: while both come with SiLabs' Secure Vault Mid security subsystem, they lack the hardware cryptographic acceleration engines of their higher-priced predecessors. Pin count, too, is reduced on the BG22L, with the part going from up to 26 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins to 18, though the BG24L retains all 26 pins.
More information on the new parts is available on SiLabs' BG22L and BG24L product pages; pricing has yet to be confirmed, with general availability expected in the second quarter of the year.