Silicon Labs' FG28 Integrates Dual-Band Sub-GHz / BLE Radio with Machine Learning Accelerator
With support for Amazon Sidewalk, Wi-SUN, and proprietary protocols.
Chips with machine learning accelerators have become popular in edge IoT devices. An accelerator means running inferences entirely on-device, saving power and time. When they do communicate, the only (on-chip) radios available are WiFi or LTE — at least until now. Silicon Labs has announced the first dual-band SoC with a sub-GHz radio and AI/ML accelerator, the FG28.
The Silicon Labs FG28 is a family of system-on-a-chip (SoC) options. They all feature an Arm Cortex-M33 core running at 78 MHz with 256 kilobytes of RAM and 1024 kilobytes of Flash memory. Additionally, there is a Matrix Vector Processor for on-device artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.
The Dual-band wireless support includes two radios: sub-GHz for long-range communication and 2.4 GHz Bluetooth Low-Energy for local configuration. Silicon Labs says the FG28 is the first sub-GHz SoC integrated with an accelerator for AI/ML.
While a specific variant of the FG28 SoC might support off-the-shelf communication technologies like Amazon Sidewalk and Wi-SUN, Silicon Labs is heavily leaning on proprietary protocol support--especially in the sub-GHz area.
Secure Vault provides a true random number generator, key management, tamper detection, firmware roll-back prevention, and other security features. The FG28 has part numbers for "Mid" and "High" Secure Vault support. However, the information provided by Silicon Labs so far does not clarify the distinction between the two levels.
Silicon Labs says FG28 samples are now available, with general availability planned by the end of 2023's third quarter. Several development boards will also be available in the future. Check out this press release or the FG28 product page for more information.