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Next for IoT End Nodes: Lower Power and Security

titleInternet of Things end nodes are often required to run on batteries for years.  Since these nodes spend much of their time sleeping, a major focus is to reduce the current consumed in various sleep or low energy modes.  Silicon Labs, with its Energy Friendly EFM32 MCU devices,  is an industry leader in this area.  However, these nodes eventually have to wake up, sense, process and communicate, even if infrequently.

Therefore, it is equally important when end nodes are performing their intended activites, are frugal with their active mode current consumption.  Enter the Silicon Labs EFM32 Jade and Pearl devices.  Based on ARM Cortex M3 and M4 cores respectively, these devices consume as little as 60 uA/MHz using the integrated DC-DC converter when operating in EM0 (active) mode.This represents a 3x reduction (from 180 uA/MHz) from the original EFM32 Gecko device.

Also important for connected devices is security.  The Jade and Pearl devices offer on-chip hardware security features that support AES, ECC, SHA-1 and SHA-2 cryptograpy.  Hardware support reduces the time to set up keys from over a minute in software to just seconds.  Security without paying the price in power consumption.

These devices come complete with a rich set of additional capabilites:

  • Up to 256 kB Flash
  • 32 kB RAM
  • Up to 32 General Purpose I/O Pins
  • Timers and Counters
  • DMA
  • Peripheral Reflex System (to minimize CPU overhead)
  • Communications Interfaces (UART, SPI, SmartCard, Low Energy UART, I2C)
  • Analog Peripherals
  • Debug Interface

And of course, all enabled with the powerful SImplicity Studio Development Environment

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