Products of the Week: Durable Digital Isolators, Contactless “Connector” ICs

Nov. 17, 2023

Starting a new design project? Check out some of the latest electronic products and solutions to hit the market.

8-Bit MCUs Powered by Coin Cells Run at 50 MHz

Silicon Labs rolled out what it called “the most powerful 8-bit MCUs on the market” suited for battery-powered consumer electronics such as power tools, handheld kitchen tools, and even children’s toys.

The EFM8BB5 is based on the company’s proprietary 8-bit MCU core, which clocks at a 50-MHz core frequency, giving it around 30% more computing power than other general-purpose 8-bit MCUs, said Silicon Labs. The BB5 family—including BB50, BB51, and BB52—operate from a wide range of input voltages, from 1.8 to 5.5 V, enabling them to last for “years” powered by nothing more than a coin-cell battery.

The family integrates a single 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) along with timers and pulse-width-modulation (PWM) circuitry. The chips contain 16 multifunction I/O pins and support UART, SMBus/I2C, and SPI interfaces. They also come in a variety of packaging footprints, including 2 × 2 mm for the BB50, while the BB51 and BB52 are housed in 3- × 3-mm packages to fit additional GPIOs and analog functions.

The MCUs join Silicon Labs’ existing 32-bit MCU family in sharing a single development platform, Simplicity Studio, which includes compilers, integrated development environments, and configurators.

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Highlights include a new series of automotive- and industrial-grade digital isolators that can withstand voltages up to 5700 V RMS and a new generation of LPDDR5X memory with high bandwidth of up to 9.6 GB/s. Also, be sure to check out a family of single-channel ESD clamping diodes for wearable electronics and a chip-to-chip connectivity IC that can replace physical DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB SuperSpeed connectors.

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