February 27, 2014 – Silicon Labs (NASDAQ: SLAB, Country Manager In-gyu Kim), a global leader in high-performance analog-intensive mixed-signal ICs, announced today the expansion of its industry-leading ARM®-based Ember® ZigBee® System-on-Chip (SoC) portfolio, which delivers superior wireless performance, energy efficiency, and reliability for the Internet of Things (IoT). Silicon Labs’ newly announced EM358x SoC family provides additional flash and RAM memory options necessary to meet the high-capacity and increasingly complex design requirements of smart energy and home automation. The Ember ZigBee family also offers USB connectivity and a local storage bootloader, enabling developers to reduce bill of material (BOM) costs and system complexity.

The EM358x SoC family provides an ideal mesh networking platform for feature-rich next-generation Zigbee applications, targeting today's IoT that integrates multiple processors. The EM358x family includes six SoC products that integrate a 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 RF transceiver, an ARM Cortex®-M3 processor, 256 kB or 512 kB of flash memory, 32 kB or 64 kB of RAM, and powerful hardware-assisted network-level debugging capabilities. The additional memory minimizes the requirements for individual system processors, allowing developers to integrate part or all of a multi-processor design into a single Zigbee SoC, thereby reducing BOM costs and end-product size. By providing large-capacity flash and RAM memory options, the EM358x SoC family enables developers to validate smart energy applications such as smart meters. Such smart meters often require more code space to store new firmware and additional RAM to extend product lifespan by up to 20 years.

The EM358x SoC further reduces system costs by providing on-chip USB peripherals that simplify system programming and eliminate the need for an external USB controller. Numerous Zigbee implementation devices require USB connectivity to provide an easy-to-use serial application interface or a service port for the device. The USB port can also be used to download new firmware images to the device, thereby reducing maintenance costs.

The EM358x SoC family features a local storage bootloader that simplifies application development. Additionally, this local storage bootloader enables field upgrades of embedded software once Ember Zigbee implementations are released to the market. The new bootloader performance reduces the number of components, cost, and size of products by utilizing the SoC's on-chip flash to store firmware images, thereby eliminating the need for external flash memory to support over-the-air (OTA) upgrade images. Products based on the EM358x SoC, such as smart meters or security sensors, can easily field upgrade when new platform features are implemented, thereby reducing operating costs.

The EM358x SoC provides excellent wireless performance with a configurable total link budget of up to 110 dB. The 8 dBm transmission power of this device eliminates the need for external power amplifiers (PAs) in numerous applications, particularly in regions such as Europe and Asia where regulatory restrictions do not allow for higher transmission power. Since wireless systems operate even in the presence of numerous types of interference, the EM358x SoC products are designed to provide excellent immunity and reliable coexistence with other 2.4GHz devices.

Geir Førre, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Microcontroller Products Business Unit at Silicon Labs, said, “The Ember Zigbee SoC products provide a core, actionable wireless technology for IoT and numerous applications, including smart energy, home automation, connected lighting, and security. By offering more memory and connectivity options, the EM358x SoC products are an easier and more cost-effective way to deploy Zigbee across a wide range of applications, including home automation and smart energy.”

The EM358x SoC products provide pin and software-compatible drop-bit replacements for Silicon Labs' widely used EM351 and EM357 Zigbee SoCs. Compatible cross-platform software libraries and tools enable easy migration from the EM351/7 products to the EM358x SoCs. The Ember Zigbee mesh networking platform complements Silicon Labs' EZRadio® and EZRadioPRO® sub-GHz transceivers and Si10xx wireless MCU products. These products provide high-performance, low-power solutions for point-to-point and star networking applications.

EM358x SoC products are fully integrated with the field-verified EmberZNet PRO protocol stack, which sets the standard for Zigbee PRO stack reliability. Built on more wireless mesh networking products than the ZigBee PRO stack, EmberZNet PRO software delivers enhanced performance in robustness, scalability, and ease of use for high-volume networks and more demanding environments. The software stack is complemented by the proven Ember desktop development environment, which reduces design time by providing sophisticated visualizations for ZigBee Smart Energy, ZigBee Home Automation, and ZigBee Light Link profiles, as well as debugging suitable tools and application examples.