Espressif has announced that they will be coming up with a new Wireless SoC which support IEEE 801.15.4.
This new wireless SoC will support Thread, ZigBee and Bluetooth 5 LE.
IEEE 802.15.4 radio connectivity will be useful for implementing mech protocols which are getting widely adopted in many IoT applications specially where your sensors are installed in the close proximity.
Keeping Bluetooth 5 LE helps easy interface and direct interface with Smartphone/PC infrastructure.
Features
The new wireless SoC will use 32 bit RISC-V Core running at Max. 96Mhz which should be good enough for most application using Zigbee/Thread/Bluetooth 5 LE.
As with other SoCs external SPI flash will be used for the firmware along with 256KB of internal RAM.
It will have about 26 programmable GPIOs with support for ADC, SPI, UART, I2C, I2S, RMT, GDMA and PWM.
Cryptographic Hardware Acceleration block inside the chip will help implement highly secure connected devices especially in connected home, connected factories space.
As per Espressif “ESP32-H2 will support Thread version 1.x and Zigbee 3.x. Espressif, as an active member of CSA, will continue to develop and support the Matter protocol on ESP32-H2 for as long as the standard progresses.
Software Support
Espressif’s mature IoT Development Framework (ESP-IDF) support will be extended for ESP32-H2 as well. IDF is a very matured framework now so it will be very easy for customer to adapt new chip.
To know more about ESP32-H2 you can contact their customer support team.
Availability and cost
As of now there is no mention about the availability of ESP32-H2 Chip and modules but hopefully we will see something coming early 2022, at least that’s the hope.