Silicon Labs introduced the new EFM32 Tiny Gecko Microcontroller (MCU) family to meet the design needs of developers for the next generation of security, battery-powered Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity devices. Silicon Labs' new EFM32TG11 Tiny Gecko MCUs provide cost-effective, ultra-low-power solutions for connectors that require long battery life without compromising functionality and safety. The Tiny Gecko 11 MCU is ideal for smart metering, personal medical devices, and home automation products that often have multiple sensors, local displays, and touch controls. The new MCUs can be used as stand-alone microcontrollers or with network-assisted processors in IoT designs, providing developers with a high degree of design flexibility.

The Tiny Gecko 11 MCU is optimized for battery-powered applications that provide cloud connectivity through wireless access points, gateways, and hubs. When paired with Silicon Labs transceivers, SoCs, or modules in many lightweight wireless applications, Tiny Gecko 11 MCUs can manage application code and wireless connectivity at the same time. When shared with complex protocols such as 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, the Tiny Gecko 11 can be assigned an independent management MCU application, which simplifies wireless system design. The Tiny Gecko 11 MCU contains ample memory, sensor interface, peripherals, communications links, and integrated security to support two wireless usage scenarios and stand-alone MCU applications.

The Tiny Gecko 11 MCU is based on the ARM Cortex-M0+ processor running at 48 MHz and not only provides enough processing power, but also maintains extremely high energy efficiency. The MCU features low operating current consumption (37μA/MHz), fast wake-up time, a range of sleep modes (1.3μA for deep sleep), and other architectural enhancements to meet the high performance and low power consumption design requirements of safe and battery-powered IoT product.

The Tiny Gecko 11 MCU integrates a range of features that can extend potential applications: capacitive sensing controllers with touch wake-up capability for applications that require a touch interface; LESENSE interface at depth Auto-sensing in sleep mode; patented 8x32-segment LCD controller, power consumption can be reduced by up to 40%; CAN controller for wired connections in industrial applications; hardware encryption, support for AES, secure hash algorithms ( SHA), Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), TRNG, Security Management Unit (SMU) to achieve precise perimeter access security.

 

The new Tiny Gecko MCU is compatible with other types of EFM32 Gecko software and pins. Compared with previous Tiny Gecko products, the new Tiny Gecko MCU has a larger flash memory (up to 128kB) and RAM (up to 32kB), enabling rich development functions. Supporting embedded applications such as the Micrium OS Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) is easier to design.