Silicon Labs and Altium release design content for EFM32 Gecko MCUs

"Close collaboration between Altium and device manufacturers allows us to generate design IP that our customers can trust and use 'out of the box'," said Rowland Washington, Product Manager CAD Library and Design Data Development for Altium. "We are pleased to see the EFM32 MCU families now available for hardware design in Altium Designer, adding to the existing support we have for EFM32 in our TASKING development toolset for ARM." A component model hosted in AltiumLive includes the schematic symbol, PCB footprint and a detailed 3D model for 3D mechanical integration during the PCB design process. Corresponding component price and availability data is drawn directly from vendor and supplier web services. AltiumLive also provides access to a host of design-related content including training and design tips videos, reference designs and a large range of documentation resources. The release of EFM32 libraries for board-level design covers the entire Gecko microcontroller range with over 240 scalable MCU options. The EFM32 products are extremely energy efficient 32-bit microcontrollers suitable for ultra-low-power applications. Energy Micro built their EFM32 microcontrollers around the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 with FPU, Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M0+ processor cores, which enable low active power consumption, reduced processing time, very fast wake-up time and ultra-low standby current. "Altium's solution is a fresh and unified tool for electronics design", said Øyvind Grotmol, Senior Engineering Director, Software, for Silicon Labs' Microcontroller business group. "We really support the simplicity aspect when it comes to development and design, and the combination of our EFM32 MCU portfolio paired with tools that make everything readily available for the designer is a key aspect when customers choose a product platform".