Today, I met SiLabs people, who presented their new MCU portfolio. As you may know, Silicon Labs accuired Energy Micro. The deal was closed just only 6 weeks ago. Energy Micro was founded by a Norwegian Geir Førre, who also founded Chipcon, which was sold to Texas Instruments. What a success of serial entrepreneur! I had once a chance to listen to Geir in Stockholm, and I have to admit that he is a wise guy.
I was more or less aware of what EM has made with the silicon, but I didn't knew their development tools offering. Simplicity Studio provides quite nice tools for energy profiling and optimization. Competitors are narrowing the gab in MCU energy consumption figures, but according to my understanding, they don't provide similar level of development software support for energy optimization. So, from my perspective, that's the #1 competitive advantage that SiLabs has in EMF over competitors.
SiLabs promises to launch an EFR family of integrated MCU+RF next year. That will contain EMF core + radio of some sort. Only preliminary numbers are provided for RF characteristics yet. However, SiLabs has good reputation in discrete radios, at least in Sub-GHz RF chips, which are extensively used by my company in customer design. Thus I expect something competitive to approach market.
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