GigaDevice talks through its MCU portfolio

GigaDevice is a fabless company that was founded in 2004, and turned its attention to global markets in 2008 “That’s when we wanted to go global,” explained Townsend.

The company is divided into five core business units: Flash, MCUs, analog - covering battery management, battery charges, DC switches and so on - sensors - for biometric fingerprint sensing - and its newer unit, niche DRAM product.   Townsend credited a close partnership with arm(R) to benefiting the company, as a total access agreement means they can start developing products on Arm’s new cores immediately, which subsequently speeds up development.

“The market is ever-evolving and ever-changing, and we can start development on new MCUs specific to those markets very quickly,” said Townsend.

The exhibit also included their second 32bit RISC-V based MCU - following on from releasing what it called the world’s first, the GD32VF103. The GD32VF103 has a RISC-V 32-bit processor operating at 108MHz frequency and provides up to 128KB on-chip Flash memory and 32KB SRAM memory.

The GD32H7 was also on show, featuring an Arm Cortex-M7 core supporting up to 600MHz clock frequency, following a collaboration with Segger.

“Segger are well known for their debug probes … debugging programme,” said Townsend. “But Segger also provides a lot of IP, a lot of software, and one of their well-known IP is a graphics library called emWIN. This is expensive, and costs a lot of money. So we did a vendor licence layout meaning the end user uses it free of charge.”

Another solution was their multi-dimension evaluation board; the GD-xD-W515, which uses different GigaDevice products to allow customers to evaluate hardware and software combinations.  

“On this board, we’re using a component from different business units,” said Townsend, to demonstrate how the company’s components from different business units can come together. This included the GD32W515 series MCU based on an Arm Cortex-M33, supporting up to 180MHz; its NOR flash which supports 128MB of memory with 3V; battery management and chargers from the analog business; an LDO power supply; and a fingerprint sensor. It delivers tailored solutions to customers across a spectrum of applications, including smart home HMI, smart door lock, and portable device control.

AI solutions on show

The proliferation of AI across hardware and software was demonstrated at GigaDevice’s booth with an AI solution for object detection and keyword detection applications.

“Keywords like power up, power down, sleep, wake up, simple words, but operating offline,” explained Townsend. “The models that you train using the tools we can implement and run on a standard processor. This one is running on our standard Cortex-M33. So it’s not a specific microcontroller, it’s a microcontroller … it has a very small footprint which means small code density and it’s all offline.” 

Conversations with customers about AI solutions go back about six months, said Townsend, but it’s a case of discerning how AI can help their application.

In ongoing discussions with customers, GigaDevice are exploring applications such as safty- using AI for false detection - and consumer markets that use touch sensing but could evolve over to voice control for customer experience.

Diversified supplying

Being fabless is a major advantage as it means the company can adopt technologies for specific MCUs - and, poignantly, help it to mitigate supply constraints.

“What we’re doing today is what we call a diversified supplying strategy. For almost each MCU product [it] will be manufactured in two separate foundries. One foundry will be in mainland China, one foundry will be in another location.”

This is currently being rolled out across the company and is not yet supported for all MCU series. It positions the company well to navigate global market uncertainties and ensure long-term supply chain resilience.

“What this means to the customer is several things: one, they’ve got a choice to use different manufacturing sources based on their preferences. More importantly, they gain access to dual-sourced MCUs from a single supplier,” said Townsend, adding that “noting that the strategy was driven by the need to stay agile in a fast-changing global environment.”