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April 15, 2024April 14, 2024 by Tomisin Olujinmi - 1 Comment

GigaDevice announces GD32F5 Cortex-M33 microcontroller targeted at high-performance applications

GigaDevice GD32F5 Cortex-M33 microcontroller

GigaDevice has officially launched the GD32F5 microcontroller series based on the Arm Cortex-M33 core. The Arm Cortex-M33 core has a maximum operating frequency of 200MHz and a working performance of up to 3.31 CoreMark/MHz. It also comes with a digital signal processing extension and a single-precision floating-point unit to reduce the load on the core. The GD32F5 microcontrollers are designed for high-performance applications and come equipped with up to 7.5MB on-chip flash, 1MB static RAM (SRAM), and diverse connectivity peripherals. The on-chip flash includes a zero-wait execution area (code flash) to improve code processing efficiency and real-time performance, and sizable data flash space for storing backups and parameters. The products support seamless OTA updates with a maximum of 2MB for Read-While-Write (RWW) operations. According to GigaDevice, the GD32F5 series is expected to find applications in “energy and power management, photovoltaic energy storage, industrial automation, programmable logic controllers (PLC), network communication […]

April 15, 2024April 14, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

ESP32-H4 low-power dual-core RISC-V SoC supports 802.15.4 and Bluetooth 5.4 LE

Espressif Systems has formally announced the ESP32-H4 low-power dual-core 32-bit RISC-V wireless microcontroller with support for 802.15.4 and Bluetooth 5.4 LE portfolio after having unveiled it at CES 2024. It’s the first Espressif chip to support Bluetooth 5.4 LE with previous models such as ESP32-H2 or ESP32-C6 only supporting Bluetooth 5.0/5.2. Besides BLE 5.4 support, the new ESP32-H4 dual-core RISC-V WiSoC is an evolution of the ESP32-H2 single-core chip with PSRAM support (up to 4MB built-in), additional GPIOs (36 vs 24), touch sensing GPIOs, and some extra security features such as a power glitch detector also found in the recently announced ESP32-C61. ESP32-H4 specifications: CPU – Dual-core 32-bit RISC-V core (at up to 96 MHz) RAM – 320KB KB SRAM, optional PSRAM up to 4MB Storage – 128KB ROM, External flash support Wireless connectivity IEEE 802.15.4 radio with Zigbee and Thread support, Matter protocol Bluetooth 5.4 (LE) radio designed in-house, […]

April 11, 2024April 11, 2024 by Tomisin Olujinmi - 1 Comment

Renesas RA0 Cortex-M23 MCU series target power and cost-sensitive applications

Renesas has announced the new low-power RA0 microcontroller series based on the power-efficient Arm Cortex-M23 core and the entry-level RA0E1 Group in the series. According to Renesas, the RA0 microcontrollers offer the “industry’s lowest overall power consumption for general-purpose 32-bit MCUs.” With a current consumption of 84.3 μA/MHz in active mode and only 0.82 mA in sleep mode, these microcontrollers are built to provide ultra-low power consumption. They also offer a Software Standby mode where the CPU, peripheral functions, and internal oscillators cease to operate. This mode reduces power consumption further by 99% down to 0.20 µA. They also come with a high-precision, High-speed On-Chip Oscillator (HOCO) for fast wake-up. The Cortex-M23 core is based on the Armv8-M instruction set and offers a maximum clock frequency of 32 MHz, with up to 64KB of code flash memory and 12KB SRAM for storing application code and data. This feature set makes […]

April 9, 2024April 10, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Silicon Labs MG26, BG26, and PG26 Cortex-M33 AI microcontrollers offer up to 3200KB flash, 512KB RAM, 64 GPIO’s

Silicon Labs MG26 BG26 P26 Cortex M33 microcontrollers

Silicon Labs has announced the xG26 family of Cortex-M33 wireless SoCs and MCUs that consists of the multiprotocol MG26 SoC, the Bluetooth LE BG26 SoC, and the PG26 general-purpose MCU without wireless connectivity, and features double the flash and RAM of the Silicon Labs xG24 devices. The xG26 family also comes with double the number of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins as the xG24 to enable engineers to build more complex devices in combination with the larger flash and memory reaching up to 3200 KB and 512KB respectively and also integrates a Matrix Vector Processor (MVP) for AI/ML hardware acceleration and Math functions. Silicon Labs MG26 and BG26 wireless SoCs MG26 and BG26 key features and specifications: MCU core – Arm Cortex-M33 @ 78 MHz AI/ML accelerator – Matrix Vector Processor that is 8x faster and 6x lower power than Cortex-M33 processing, and supports an MVP Math Library for non-ML workloads […]

March 29, 2024March 31, 2024 by Debashis Das - No Comments

Nuvoton launches M433 Series ultra-low power Arm Cortex-M4F MCUs, NuMaker-M433SE development board

Nuvoton NuMaker M433SE development board

Nuvoton has recently announced their M433 Series MCUs (M433LE8AE and M433SE8AE) along with the NuMaker-M433SE development board. Nuvoton is calling this the “M433 CAN/USB FS OTG” Series, featuring an Arm Cortex-M4F core with DSP and FPU extensions. The MCU is clocked at 144 MHz and consumes 350 nA in deep power-down mode, making it ideal for battery-operated IoT, industrial, and consumer applications. This is not the first Nuvoton MCU we have written about. In recent months, we have seen Nuvoton release the NuMicro M091 Series, the Nuvoton MA35H0 – a cost-optimized MPU, and other dev boards and MCUs. Feel free to check those out if you are interested in the topic. Nuvoton M433 Series MCUs specifications: MCU core 144 MHz Arm Cortex-M4F Includes DSP and FPU instructions Memory Protection Unit (MPU) with 8 regions Memory Up to 128 KB Flash 4 KB LDROM Up to 64 KB SRAM with parity […]

March 28, 2024March 28, 2024 by Tomisin Olujinmi - No Comments

Toshiba M4K Group microcontrollers for motor control get expanded flash & memory capacity

Toshiba has included eight new products with 512KB/1MB flash storage capacity and four packages in its M4K Group of Arm Cortex-M4-powered microcontrollers. The M4K Group is part of Toshiba’s TXZ+ Family Advanced Class, consisting of five groups of low-power, high-performance 32-bit microcontrollers. The new microcontrollers expand code flash memory to 512KB/1MB from the 256KB maximum supported by current products, and RAM capacity to 64KB from 24KB. They retain the Arm Cortex-M4 core, integrated code flash, and 32KB data flash memory (with 100K program/erase cycles). With different motor control options such as advanced programmable motor circuits, advanced 32-bit encoders, advanced vector engine plus, and three units of high-speed, high-resolution 12-bit analog/digital converters, these class of microcontrollers are quite capable of 3-motor control, even in small scale applications (64-pin). The new products with 1MB code flash separate the memory into two distinct 512KB areas, enabling memory swap and seamless over-the-air firmware updates, […]

March 28, 2024March 27, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Ambiq Apollo510 Arm Cortex-M55 MCU delivers up to 30x better power efficiency for AI/ML workloads

Ambiq Apollo Cortex-M55 AI microcontroller

Ambiq Apollo510 Arm Cortex-M55 microcontroller delivers 30 times better power efficiency than typical Cortex-M4 designs and 10 times the performance of the Apollo4 Cortex-M4 sub-threshold microcontroller for AI and ML workloads. The new MCU also comes with 4MB NVM, 3.75MB SRAM, a 2.5D GPU with vector graphics acceleration that’s 3.5 times faster than the Apollo4 Plus, and support for low-power Memory-in-Pixel (MiP) displays. Like all other Ambiq microcontrollers, the Apollo510 operates at sub-threshold voltage for ultra-low power consumption and implements security with the company’s secureSPOT platform with Arm TrustZone technology. Ambiq Apollo510 specifications: MCU Core – Arm Cortex-M55 core up to 250 MHz with Arm Helium MVE, Arm TrustZone, FPU, MPU, 64KB I-cache, 64KB D-cache, 256KB I-TCM (Tighly Coupled Memory), 256KB D-TCM, Graphics – 2.5D GPU clocked at 96 MHz or 250 MHz with vector graphics acceleration, anti-aliasing hardware acceleration, rasterizer/full alpha blending/texture mapping, texture/framebuffer compression (TSC4, 6, 6A and […]

March 27, 2024March 27, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

ESP32-C5 beta board features 2.4GHz and 5GHz SMA antenna connectors, two USB-C ports

Espressif ESP32-C5 microcontroller was announced in June 2022 as the first dual-band WiFi 6 IoT chip from the company. It’s been quiet since then, but things are about to change as the ESP32-C5 beta board’s documentation has very recently been released. The ESP32-C5 was initially announced as a dual-band WiFI 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE SoC, but the user manual for the beta board indicates that it also supports Zigbee 3.0 and Thread 1.3, so there’s an 802.15.4 in the wireless microcontroller. The ESP32-C5 board itself features two SMA connectors for 2.4 GHz and 5GHz antennas or test equipment, two USB-C ports, two 12-pin GPIO header, Boot and Reset buttons, an RGB LED, and a 2-pin header for current measurements. ESP32-C5 beta board specifications: SoC – ESP32-C5-BETA3 CPU – Single-core 32-bit RISC-V processor @ up to 240 MHz Memory – 400KB SRAM on-chip Storage – 384KB of ROM on-chip, support […]