Silicon Labs' Latest xG26 Chips Boast the "Highest Combination of Flash, RAM, and GPIO" for Matter
Range-topping model comes with 512kB of RAM and 3,200kB of program flash, plus a multi-protocol radio and tinyML acceleration hardware.
Silicon Labs has announced what it claims to be the "industry's highest combination of flash, RAM, and GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output]" in a Matter-compatible wireless system-on-chip: the new xG26 family.
"As users from consumer to industrial sectors extract more benefits from their IoT [Internet of Things] deployments, their requirements are steadily increasing," explains SiLabs chief executive officer Matt Johnson of the thinking behind the company's latest microcontroller launch. "The new xG26 family is built for the future, empowering device manufacturers with the confidence that their current designs will meet tomorrow's demands."
The company's xG26 range is split across three model families: the multi-protocol MG26, the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) BT26, and the PG26 microcontroller. The parts offer up to twice the flash memory, RAM, and GPIO pins of their xG24 predecessors, SiLabs says, while boosting performance through the use of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and SiLabs' proprietary matrix vector processor to accelerate on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads.
The top-end EFR32MG26 parts come with 512kB of RAM, 3,200kB of program flash, and a 78MHz Cortex-M33 with floating-point unit and digital signal processor (DSP) capabilities. The radio, meanwhile, offers support for IEEE 802.15.4 protocols including OpenThread, Zigbee, and the interoperable Matter standard, in addition to Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) and Bluetooth Mesh. There are up to 64 GPIO pins, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with high-speed and high-accuracy modes, a two-channel digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and buses including three USART, four EUSART, and four I2C.
The EFR32BG26, by contrast, drops the maximum RAM and flash to 256kB and 2,048kB respective and drops IEEE 802.15.4 support — but with a boost to Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE), and retaining the same peripheral connectivity as its stablemate. Finally, the EFR32PG26 drops the radio entirely — and in doing so gets a clock-speed bump to 80MHz.
More information on the new chips is available on the SiLabs website, though at the time of writing the company yet to confirm availability and pricing.