Chips with machine learning accelerators are prevalent in edge IoT devices. Acceleration means running inference entirely on-device, saving power and time. For communication, at least until now, the only (on-chip) radio available was WiFi or LTE. Silicon Labs Sub-GHz Radio and AI/ML Accelerator, FG28.
Silicon Labs FG28 is a family of system-on-chip (SoC) options. They all feature an Arm Cortex-M33 core running at 78 MHz and 256 Kbytes of RAM and 1024 Kbytes of Flash memory. Additionally, there is a matrix vector processor for on-device artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.
Dual-band wireless support includes two radios: sub-GHz for long-range communication and 2.4 GHz Bluetooth Low-Energy for local configuration. According to Silicon Labs, the FG28 is the first sub-GHz SoC integrated with an accelerator for AI/ML.
Certain variants of the FG28 SoC may support off-the-shelf communication technologies such as: Amazon Sidewalk and Wi-SUNSilicon Labs relies heavily on proprietary protocol support, especially in the sub-GHz region.
secure vault It offers true random number generators, key management, tamper detection, firmware rollback prevention, and other security features. The FG28 has part numbers for “medium” and “high” Secure Vault support. However, the information Silicon Labs has provided so far does not make a clear distinction between the two levels.
Samples of the FG28 are available now, with general availability expected by the end of Q3 2023, according to Silicon Labs. In the future, some development boards will also be available.check this out press release or FG28 product page for more information.
