Editing by Xin Lanhua

Chinese fabless semiconductor company Gigadevice officially released its latest Wi-Fi microcontroller of Arm® Cortex®-M33 core-based GD32W515 series in late November and sells it on Alibaba’s Tmall, apart from its usual channel.

This new MCU features leading baseband and RF capability, a Trusted Execution Environment for secure data storage (through in-built TrustZone architecture), and compatibility between software and hardware that the GD32 MCU family has.

With more integrated and enhanced processing capability, GD32W515 provides Wi-Fi connection for application scenarios like smart homes, industrial IoT, and other consumer electronics. The sample of this series has been available and will be mass-produced in December.

Source: GigaDevice's official website

Jin Guangyi, GigaDevice's Marketing Director, said, “We will offer innovative shortcuts for various developing requirements in AIoT age through more wireless MCU products. With the Cortex®-M33 core-based processing capability and accelerator, this new Wi-Fi MCU can support edge calculation and AI algorithms. The TrustZone secure architecture can improve the information security in IoT terminals, protecting users’ privacy in this big data age.”

GigaDevice, founded in Silicon Valley in 2005 and now headquartered in Beijing, is a fabless supplier and was listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2016. The company builds an ecosystem with three major product lines—flash memory, MCU and sensor, providing solutions for applications in the fields of automotive, computing, consumer electronics, IoT, mobile and communications.

According to the introduction, the GD32W515 series adopts the latest Arm® Cortex®-M33 core, integrating 2.4GHz single stream IEEE802.11b/g/n MAC/Baseband/RF module.

This newly launched Wi-Fi MCU boasts baseband and RF capability. It provides up to 2048 KB on-chip Flash memory and supports up to 32MB of EXT Flash memory and up to 448 KB SRAM memory.

Additional peripherals such as TrustZone protection controller union (TZPCU), digital camera interface (DCI), touch sensing interface (TSI), quad-SPI interface (QSPI) are included.

Thanks to the system isolation feature TrustZone architecture offers, the MCU supports the secure start-up in a secure area and proves secure storage, initialization authentication, and security log, protecting confidential code and data, core process, and key peripheral devices.

GigaDevice equipped the GD32W515 products with specific development boards. GD32W515P-EVAL evaluation board supports function demonstration and debugging. Both boards are released simultaneously and will be available on GD32.tmall.com.