Silicon Laboratories has introduced the C8051F96x, Si102x and Si103x series of wireless microcontrollers for power-sensitive, battery-operated embedded applications. The microcontrollers are suitable for water, gas and heat meters, in-home utility monitoring, wireless security, home and building automation, portable medical and asset tracking products. The Si102x and 3x microcontrollers combine the power-saving features of the F96x with the company's EZRadioPRO sub-GHz transceiver into a single chip. An on-chip DC/DC buck converter can supply up to 250mW of power to the microcontroller and other circuits in the system. An on-chip dedicated packet processing engine with hardware acceleration blocks is said to enable high-speed RF message processing and allow the CPU to remain idle during transactions. The microcontrollers have a low-power pulse counter that operates autonomously in sleep mode without CPU intervention, and a real-time clock to enable low power in sleep mode, says the company. They achieve 400 and 70nA sleep current with and without the real-time clock, respectively, at 3V and a 10nA sleep current mode is also available. They offer a wake up time of 2ms. and are supported by a unified development platform having one motherboard, modular boards, and integrated LCD.
