In a recent blog post, Espressif announced the ESP32-C2. The Twitter thread from John Lee revealed an interesting twist; more on that in a moment. ESP32-C2 is a WiFi4 + BLE5.0 device with a single RISC-V core and 272MB of memory. It uses the familiar Espressif tools like ESP-IDF and frameworks such as ESP-Jumpstart and ESP-RainMaker. It has on-chip ROM to reduce the need for common routines in flash.
Espressif is proud of the cost and radio performance of this device. Reducing power consumption was also a goal, which should help deliver this part into more IoT class projects.
ESP32-C2 is a low-cost WiFi chip supporting the Matter standard.
“Matter” is a royalty-free home automation connectivity standard, introduced late in 2019. Matter aims to reduce fragmentation across different vendors, and achieve interoperability among smart home devices and Internet of things and is backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, and other big names in that space. In the soon-to-be-released Matter 1st release, it supports WiFi, Thread, and Ethernet protocols.
With WiFi being so pervasive, devices like this supporting both WiFi and Matter Thread will be important for many years.
Doc for ESP32-C2 is available now. Chips are just starting to sample, with no availability date yet given.
But now, back to the scoop…
John Lee is a Senior Customer Support Representative at Espressif. He runs the @espressif Twitter account and is a good read. He originally posted the above announcement. I knew that Espressif’s last few chips (ESP32-C3, ESP32-C6) had been RISC-V, but I also knew they had a long run with CPU cores from Tensillica. One of the great tricks that Espressif pulled off with ESP32-C3 was treating replacing the CPU core as such a minor point that it barely was mentioned in the marketing doc and hardly even reflected in the chip’s name. I asked John for a clarification: “Are all C and H series going to be RISC-V?”. John quickly answered “Yes. In fact all of the subsequent chips are RISC V.” One of the things we gave up between ESP32 and ESP32-C3 was going down from two Tensillica cores to a single RISC-V core, so the natural question of multiple cores quickly followed. John put that to rest with “Expecting to go up to 4 one of these days.” Hairs continued to be split and he confirmed that meant “”All” as on actually all next generation Espressif chips across all product lines will be RISC-V instead of Tensilica Xtensa? Not just the Cx series”.
That’s actually pretty big news on its own for RISC-V. Espressif is committing that all next generation products will be RISC-V and that at least some of them will be as large as four cores. Since Espressif has long been a leader of SoCs and Modules that package the SoCs with antennas, oscillators, and such into a single (usually certification-approved) package for both hobbyists and in the commercial space, this should result in a huge number of RISC-V cores hitting the market, even though they’re somewhat invisible as the user “just” wants to open a radio connection and not necessarily program the radio themselves.
Thank you for that scoop, John!