Bouffalo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC

Bouffalo Lab BL616/BL618 is a 32-bit RISC-V wireless microcontroller with support for 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 dual-mode, and an 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee, Thread, and Matter designed for IoT applications.

We first spotted the BL616 RISC-V IoT MCU during the BL602/BL606 announcement in November 2020, but we had virtually no additional information about it so far. It appears both BL616 and BL618 will be launched next month with the main difference between the two being that BL616 has 19 GPIOs and BL618 comes with 35 GPIOs.

Bouffalo Lab BL616 and BL618 specifications:

Bouffalo BL616 and BL818 are supported by the latest version of the open-source bl_mcu_sdk MCU software development kit available on GitHub. You can download the datasheet and reference manual for more details about the microcontrollers. While the new Matter protocol is not mentioned in any of the documents, Bouffalo Lab will be using BL616 for WiFi Matter, BL618 in both Matter border routers and bridges.

The BL616/8 was brought to my attention by Sipeed who is planning to launch the tiny (11x10mm) M0S module by mid-January 2023. The M0S is based on the BL616 RISC-V microcontroller @ up to 384 MHz with WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and Zigbee, 4MB flash, 512KB SRAM, a ceramic antenna, USB 2.0, and a few other I/Os. Sipeed expects to sell it for less than $2 at launch. You can find more details about the module on Twitter.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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