Silicon Labs Expands MCU Platform with new 8-bit MCU family

Silicon Labs announced the expansion of their microcontroller unit (MCU) development platform with a new family of 8-bit MCUs optimized for price and performance. These new MCUs join the PG2x family of 32-bit MCUs in sharing a single development platform, Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio, which is inclusive of all tools that are required like compilers, integrated development environments, and configurators.

As the applications for embedded computing continue to expand, developers need to be able to select the right hardware for the job. While 32-bit MCUs are ideal for more complex and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning inference or word recognition, there are much simpler tasks that don't require the added power, and cost, of a 32-bit MCU. What has been challenging for developers, however, is that most 8-bit and 32-bit MCUs use different development tools, making it difficult to develop for both, so developers will often absorb the extra development costs despite not needing the greater compute.

That's why Silicon Labs designed its 8-bit and 32-bit MCU offerings to both leverage Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio. This development platform, also shared by Silicon Labs wireless enabled SoCs, drastically simplifies and accelerates the ability of device manufacturers to bring a broad range of devices to market. This eliminates the need for developers to learn two sets of tools and enables them to cost-optimize their devices by selecting the part that best fits the application's need (more info).