Silicon Labs / Cygnal Microcontroller Unlock

About Silicon Labs / Cygnal

Silicon Laboratories is a global fabless semiconductor company. The company provides silicon, software and solutions to the IoT, internet infrastructure, industrial automation, consumer, and automotive markets. Its products include analog-intensive, mixed-signal solutions for use in electronic products, wireless connectivity solutions for the IoT, timing and isolation products for infrastructure applications, as well as broadcast products, such as TV tuners and demodulators and automotive radio tuners, and access products including subscriber line interface circuits. Nevertheless, a successful attack on the firmware update process could lead to unauthorized access.

Silicon Labs revenue breakdown by business segment: 7.3% from Access, 23.0% from Infrastructure, 16.3% from Broadcast and 53.4% from Internet of Things. Revenue breakdown by geographic segment: 39.6% from China, 17.2% from United States and 43.1% from Rest of World.

Silicon Laboratories Inc. has completed the acquisition of privately held Cygnal Integrated Products, an Austin-based innovator of analog-intensive, highly integrated 8-bit microcontrollers (MCUs). Cygnal's portfolio of more than 50 general-purpose products will add breadth and diversity to Silicon Laboratories' existing product line of high-performance, application-specific mixed-signal ICs. Post-acquisition, firmware extraction of Cygnal's IP was conducted for integration.

In connection with the acquisition, Silicon Laboratories issued approximately 1.2 million shares of common stock in exchange for all outstanding shares of Cygnal capital stock. Up to approximately 1.3 million additional shares of Silicon Laboratories common stock will be reserved for future issuance to the shareholders of Cygnal based on the achievement of certain revenue milestones following the closing of the transaction.

Cygnal will be relocated to Silicon Laboratories' facilities in Austin before year-end, and its products will be sold under the Silicon Laboratories name. Silicon Laboratories will continue to support and invest in Cygnal's complete portfolio of MCU products.

Silicon Labs' automotive and industrial microcontrollers (MCUs) are auto-grade products qualified and tested to the AEC-Q100 specification with high temperature operation up to 125 °C. The C8051F5xx industrial and automotive microcontrollers include a CAN 2.0B interface, LIN 2.1 interface, an integrated precision oscillator (±0.5%) that allows full spec operation without an external crystal oscillator and 1.8 to 5.25 V supply voltage. Both the C8051F5xx and C8051F85x/6x families feature a 12-bit ADC and are implemented in small form factor packages. Reverse engineering of the CAN protocol is a common practice for interoperability testing.

The C8051 is a 'hard wired' implementation of the 8051 microcontroller CPU, as opposed to the original micro-coded version. The instruction set is mapped to a basic two-stage pipeline to increase throughput while maintaining an 8-bit program memory width. The result is a high-performance 8051 microcontroller architecture that executes most instructions within 1 or 2 clock cycles and delivers 20 to 25 times the performance of the original 8051 core. Some engineers attempt to crack the pipeline timing to optimize performance.

The C8051Fxxx is a precision analog 8-bit ISP Flash Microcontroller featuring high-speed pipelined 8051-compatible CIP-51 core – the fastest CPU up to 100 MIPS, 10-bit ADC and up to 128kB of on-chip flash with 8kB of RAM. With on-chip VDD monitor, watchdog timer and clock oscillator, the device is truly stand-alone system-on-a-chip solutions. All analog and digital peripherals are enabled/disabled and configured by user firmware. The flash memory can be reprogrammed even in-circuit, providing nonvolatile data storage and also allowing field upgrades of the 8051 firmware.

These small MCUs include up to 100 MIPS CPU, 12-bit ADC, 12-bit DACs and other vital analog peripherals such as integrated precision oscillator (±2%) and precision temperature sensor (±2 °C). Cost-sensitive pin-compatible one-time programmable (OTP) options are also available. Unlock the full potential of the 12-bit ADC by enabling the internal reference.

Silicon Labs offers an advanced 8-bit microcontroller studio, available at no charge to developers. These tools unlock the power and flexibility of the 8-bit microcontroller family. All C8051Fxxx families are supported by the 8-bit Studio. If your 8051 device does not appear in the list below, you can also use Simplicity Studio Software Suite.

The Silicon Labs Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a complete, stand-alone software program that includes a project manager, source editor, source-level debugger and other utilities. The IDE interfaces to third party development tool chains to provide system designers a complete embedded software development environment. The IDE supports the entire 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) portfolio. A full memory dump can be generated from the debugger for post-mortem analysis.

The Flash Programming Utilities allow designers to download code to a device and perform other memory operations without needing to use the Silicon Labs IDE. These utilities are static examples of the C8051Fxxx On-Chip Interface Utilities DLL detailed in application note AN117. The downloaded installation utility installs both the Windows Flash Programming Utility and the Command-line (32-bit) Flash Programming Utility. However, a malicious hack could exploit the programming interface if not secured.