New multi protocol, low-power wireless MCU

In recent years, the global MCU shipment quantity and market scale have maintained a steady growth, and MCU manufacturers have deployed MCU product lines for various applications. Benefiting from the rapid development of the Internet of Things, the number of networking nodes has increased. The layout of wireless MCU has become the strategic direction of many MCU manufacturers. The vast majority of MCU manufacturers have wireless MCU product line layout, and each of them has different characteristics. After all, no one wants to be inferior in the big market of the Internet of Things. It can be said that the wireless MCU market is not only an internal volume, but also an internal volume, with large factories and small factories rolling together.

In the IoT scenario, many devices are very sensitive to power consumption and cost. Therefore, power consumption and cost have always been the most serious performance of wireless MCU. In addition, MCU manufacturers are also fighting fiercely in terms of communication capability and integration. Recently, many manufacturers have introduced new wireless MCU or made many innovations in the main series. Is there any new breakthrough in these new series?

TI CC1311R3

CC1311R3 belongs to TI's SimpleLink series and is the latest wireless MCU in the series. With Thread, SimpleLink can seamlessly integrate with existing cloud based infrastructure. CC1311R3 uses ARM Cortex-M4 core, which is a multi protocol Sub-1 GHz wireless MCU. CC1311R3 is configured with 352KB flash memory, 32KB SRAM, 8KB cache SRAM, and supports OTA.

Since power consumption is the most serious performance of the internal volume, let's start with power consumption. In the MCU part, the current is 2.63mA under normal working mode, 0.7 µ A under standby mode, and 0.1 µ A under off mode when the pin wakes up. The wireless consumption is in the 868MHz frequency band, 5.4mA during reception and 24.9mA during transmission. In terms of power consumption, compared with the previous wireless MCU products, it has made certain optimization for wireless communication and sensing. The optimization of power consumption is also related to the built-in high efficiency PA, which reduces the current consumption under+14 dBm transmission.

CC1311R3 supports 143 to 176 MHz, 287 to 351 MHz, 359 to 527 MHz, 861 to 1054 MHz, and 1076 to 1315 MHz frequency bands. The MCU that can work in so many frequency bands should be flexible enough. The digital peripherals of CC1311R3 can be routed to any GPIO. These peripherals include 32-bit and 16 bit timers, 12 bit ADC with 200 kSps sampling rate, 8-bit DAC, RTC, etc.

The new wireless MCU gives the impression that its performance has been improved compared with the previous model, especially its power consumption.