Industry’s smallest energy-friendly touch sensing microcontroller

Designed for ultra-low-power, small-footprint IoT applications with capacitive touch sensing requirements, Silicon Labs has introduced the latest member of its EFM8 8-bit MCU portfolio. The new EFM8SB1 Sleepy Bee MCUs, available in a 1.78mm x 1.66mm wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP), are the industry’s smallest MCUs – one-fourth the size of 8-bit MCUs in conventional QFN packages, says the company. The tiny MCUs target 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 Sleepy Bee MCUs are Silicon Labs’ most 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 25MHz, and flash sizes range from 2kB to 8kB. The MCUs also integrate a best-in-class capacitive sense controller offering an ultra-low-power < 1µA 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. In addition to 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. 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, says the company. “By combining exceptional energy efficiency, capacitive touch capabilities, a rich peripheral set and a best-in-class development environment with the world’s smallest MCU footprint, the EFM8SB1 Sleepy Bee family embodies our ‘MCUs without compromise’ design philosophy,” said Tom Pannell, marketing director for microcontroller products, Silicon Labs. “If you need a tiny, ultra-low-power cap-touch MCU for applications with flash memory requirements below 8 kB, our EFM8SB1 MCUs are a perfect for your IoT design.”