Silicon Labs introduces the industry's smallest energy-efficient touch-sensitive microcontroller

     Silicon Labs, a leading provider of energy-efficient microcontroller (MCU) solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced the latest addition to its EFM8 8-bit MCU portfolio, designed to meet the demand for ultra-low power, small size packages and capacitive touch sensing in IoT applications. The new EFM8SB1 Sleepy Bee MCU is the industry's smallest MCU and supports a 1.78mm×1.66mm wafer-level chip size package (WLCSP), a quarter of the traditional 8-bit MCUQFN package size. These extremely small MCUS are ideal for touch-based, battery-powered and space-constrained IoT and industrial applications that typically require long battery life and energy-efficient human interfaces, such as wearables, remote controls, Bluetooth accessories, e-readers, as well as industrial automation, home automation and office equipment.

     The EFM8SB1 Sleepy Bee MCU is Silicon Labs' most energy efficient 8-bit MCU, offering industry-leading sleep mode power consumption (only 50nA with memory content retention and power down detection enabled) and ultra-fast wake times of 2μs. Core speeds can be scaled up to 25MHz, and flash memory capacity supports 2kB to 8kB. The MCU also integrates a best-in-class capacitive sensing controller to provide ultra-low power touch wake capability (< 1µA) and 12 reliable capacitive touch sensing channels, thus eliminating the on/off switch commonly required in many space-sensitive products, such as wearables.

     In addition to providing advanced on-chip Capacitive sensing technology, Silicon Labs supports touch-sensitive interface design with the excellent Capacitive Sense Library integrated in the Simplicity Studio™ development platform. Provides all the features and algorithms needed to add capacitive sensing interfaces to IoT products. Simplicity Studio provides firmware designers with production-ready firmware ranging from scanning keys to noise filtering. By using the Simplicity Studio Capacitive Sense Profiler tool to visualize real-time data and capacitive touch key noise levels, developers can easily customize touch and non-touch thresholds and noise filtering configurations. Greatly simplifies the difficulty of adding capacitive touch capabilities to IoT applications.

     EFM8SB1 MCUS offer a wealth of analog and digital peripherals, including high resolution capacitive digital converters (CDC), 12-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), high performance timers, enhanced SPI, I2C and UART serial ports. Developers can easily configure these and other analog/mixed-signal peripherals through Silicon Labs' patented Crossbar technology.

     Tom Pannell, Director of microcontroller product marketing at Silicon Labs, said: "The EFM8SB1 Sleepy Bee family combines outstanding energy efficiency, capacitive touch sensing, a rich set of peripheral devices, a best-in-class development environment and the world's smallest MCU size, and embodies our" demanding the perfect MCU "design philosophy. "If you need a very small, ultra-low power capacitive touch sensitive MCU for applications requiring less than 8kB of flash memory, the EFM8SB1 MCU is the best choice for IoT design."