Silicon Labs has introduced the latest member of its EFM8 8-bit MCU portfolio designed for ultra-low-power, small-footprint IoT applications with capacitive touch sensing requirements. The new EFM8SB1 "Sleepy Bee" MCUs, available in a 1.78 mm x 1.66 mm wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP), are the industry's smallest MCUs - one-fourth the size of 8-bit MCUs in conventional QFN packages.
These tiny MCUs are ideal for touch-based, battery-powered and space-constrained IoT and industrial applications requiring long battery lifetimes and energy-efficient human interfaces. Target applications include wearables, remote controls, Bluetooth accessories and eReaders, as well as industrial automation, home automation and office equipment.
The EFM8SB1 MCUs are energy-friendly 8-bit devices offering industry-leading sleep mode power (50 nA with full memory retention and brown-out detection) and an ultra-fast 2 µs wake-up time. Core speeds scale up to 25 MHz, and flash sizes range from 2 kB to 8 kB. The MCUs also integrate a best-in-class capacitive sense controller offering an ultra-low-power < 1 µA wake-on-touch capability and 12 robust capacitive touch channels, eliminating the need for on/off switches in many space-sensitive products such as wearables.
Besides providing advanced on-chip capacitive sensing technology, Silicon Labs supports touch-sense interface design with its best-in-class Capacitive Sense Library available within the Simplicity Studio™ development platform, offering all of the features and algorithms required to add capacitive sensing interfaces to IoT products. Simplicity Studio provides firmware designers with production-ready firmware, from scanning buttons to filtering noise. In addition, by using the Simplicity Studio Capacitive Sense Profiler to visualize real-time data and the noise levels of cap-sense buttons, developers can easily customize touch and no-touch thresholds and noise filtering settings, greatly simplifying the addition of capacitive touch to IoT applications.
The EFM8SB1 MCUs offer a rich mix of analog and digital peripherals including a high-resolution capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC), a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), high-performance timers, and enhanced SPI, I2C and UART serial ports. These and other analog/mixed-signal peripherals are all easily configurable and accessible to developers through Silicon Labs' patented crossbar technology.
