Silicon Labs Launches Its MG26 Wireless SoC Family, Targeting Matter Communications and TinyML
Unveiled back in April last year, the MG26 chips — the top of the xG26 tree — are now generally available.
Silicon Labs has announced general availability of its MG26 wireless system-on-chip (SoC) family, designed with increased memory and flash storage capacities to support modern Matter smart home applications.
"With MG26, we're not just setting a new standard in multiprotocol wireless performance for battery-based, low-power smart home applications — we're redefining what's possible for the future of IoT [Internet of Things] connectivity with Matter," boasts Silicon Labs' Jacob Alamat of the chip's launch into general availability. "This device empowers developers to create smarter, safer, and more powerful solutions in an increasingly connected world."
The MG26 range was first unveiled back in April last year as part of the larger xG26 family, alongside the PG26 and BG26 — the latter a straightforward microcontroller and the BT26 adding Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, where the MG26 topped the line-up with multi-protocol radio capabilities.
The parts, focusing primarily though not exclusively on projects revolving around the cross-vendor Matter smart home connectivity standard, feature more memory than is present on SiLabs' previous offerings — up to twice as much, with the range-topping EFR32MG26 offering 512kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 3,200kB of flash program storage. The radio and security subsystems get their own dedicated controller cores, too, alongside a central Arm Cortex-M33 core running at up to 78MHz — and featuring, the company says, embedded machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) acceleration hardware to deliver up to eight times the performance at one-sixth the power compared to previous chips.
The radio side of the chips, meanwhile, delivers support for IEEE 802.15.4 implementations including OpenThread, Zigbee, and the aforementioned Matter, plus Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) and Bluetooth Mesh support. The MG26 range also delivers more general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity than equivalent predecessors, with up to 64 pins, an on-board analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with high-speed and high-accuracy modes, a two-channel digital-to-analog converter, and three USART, four EUSART, and four I2C buses, among others.
More information on the new chips is available on the Silicon Labs website, where pricing has been confirmed starting at $3.68 per chip in thousand-unit tray quantities; a development kit is also available, designed to act as any of the MG26, BG26, and PG26 variants, priced at $185.