FG23 Wireless Sub-GHz SoC | First Look

Silicon Labs' FG23 is the industry’s first wireless sub-GHz SoC with an Arm® Cortex®-M33, a dedicated security core and Arm PSA3 certification. The EFR32FG23 product family combines an energy-friendly microcontroller, up to 512 kbytes of flash, and 64 kbytes of RAM with a high performance radio transceiver and integrated power amplifier with up to 20 dBm of transmit power. All of this includes a robust set of peripherals with up to 31 GPIO for easy prototyping. The high-performance subGHz radio provides long range and is not susceptible to 2.4 GHz interference from technologies like Wi-Fi. This radio can operate with a number of support modulation formats and protocols for both custom and standard sub-GHz communications. The high performance receiver offers sensitivities ranging from -98.6 dBm to -110.7 dBm depending on the modulation format and carrier frequency. While transmit power can go as high at 20 dBm with a transmit current of 85.5 milliamps, the FG23 can operate in a number of low energy consumption modes with DeepSleep currents going down to 1.2 µA to greatly extend node life in battery-constrained IoT applications. The enhanced security features both a dedicated hardware core and a secure boot with faster, energy-efficient hardware encryption, a true random number generator (TRNG), and secure debug control that helps prevent unauthorized access to end-products.