Silicon Labs has expanded its energy-friendly EFM32 Gecko portfolio with industrial-strength microcontrollers (MCUs) delivering better performance, more features and lower power. The new EFM32GG11 Giant Gecko MCU family offers an improved feature set available in the low-power MCU market, targeting smart metering, asset tracking, industrial/building automation, wearables and personal medical applications. Their MCUs combine peak 72 MHz processing performance, large memory options, peripherals and hardware accelerators, and comprehensive software tools including the Micrium OS.
Internet of Things (IoT) applications are growing increasingly complex, driving the need for multiple sensors, sophisticated end-user displays, advanced algorithms and wireless stacks. As power budgets shrink, MCUs must excel at sleep mode to maximize battery life.
Key features:
- ARM Cortex-M4 processor core supporting performance-intensive applications
- Largest internal memory footprint in its MCU class (up to 2 MB flash and 512 KB RAM) to accommodate more code, debugging capabilities, over the air (OTA) updates, data logging and rich graphics
- SD/MMC and Octal/Quad-SPI memory interfaces to support additional memory expansion capabilities for memory-intensive applications
- Fast wake-up/sleep transitions and a low-energy fabric allowing autonomous access to sensor inputs and enabling
low-power peripherals to operate autonomously
- Ultra-low power consumption: 77 µA/MHz in active mode and 1.6 µA in deep sleep mode
New integrations:
- 10/100 Ethernet media access control (MAC) for IP-based industrial control
- Secure digital input output (SDIO) Wi-Fi interface for IP-based wireless cloud connectivity
- Single or dual CAN bus controllers for
industrial applications- Crystal-free USB controller for cost-effective, ultra-low-energy universal connectivity
- Thin film transistor (TFT) display hardware acceleration with per-pixel alpha blending and ultra-low-energy segment LCD driver, enabling richer user interfaces
- Current-based capacitive sense engine providing robust touch input and ultra-low power wake-on-touch, simplifying the development of cap-sense applications