Ultra-low-power wireless MCUs for battery-operated IoT devices

With Redpine Signals’ RS14100 WiSeMCUTM family, Rutronik offers what is claimed to be the first wireless secure MCUs providing a comprehensive multi-protocol wireless sub-system. Furthermore, the SoCs and modules feature voice activity detection and up to eight inputs for capacitive touch sensors. The series provides the industry’s lowest power consumption for battery-operated IoT devices.

The wireless SoCs and modules can perform multiple protocols at the same time, including 802.11a/b/g/n (2.4GHz and 5GHz), dual-mode Bluetooth 5 und 802.15.4 for Thread and Zigbee.

The on-chip application manager is based on an Arm-Cortex-M4 with an efficient performance of up to 180MHz and up to 4MB flash memory. Different power modes are offered to manage the power consumption of the operating system as required. The ultra-low-power SoCs and modules allow the lowest Wi-Fi standby associated power of up to 50uA, the Arm-Cortex-M4 can offer as low as 15 uA/MHz operation. The integrated Bluetooth 5 has lower power than even stand-alone Bluetooth 5 devices.

The SoCs and modules are based on a secure-zone architecture and use various levels of security, including Physically Unclonable Function, Crypto HW accelerators, Secure Boothloader and secure firmware upgrade, XIP and peripherals. That’s how they give sufficient security for applications such as smart locks, mobile point-of-sale terminals, medical devices or secure voice-based ordering.