Today Espressif announced that the ESP32-S2 SoC and its related modules (ESP32-S2-WROVER, ESP32-S2-WROOM) and development board (ESP32-S2-Saola-1) have gone into mass production. The ESP32-S series, based on a highly secure Wi-Fi MCU, was launched in 2019, after ESP32 in 2016 and ESP8266 earlier in 2014. This latest series of products have a special focus on the chip's enhanced encryption capabilities, enabling larger eFuse storage.

The ESP32-S2 chip is equipped with a 240 MHz Xtensa® 32-bit LX7 single-core processor with 320 KB of SRAM and 128 KB of ROM, as well as a ULP coprocessor based on the RISC-V architecture. With a single-core processor, the ESP32-S2 has lower power consumption, while maintaining excellent processing capabilities. It is based on Espressif's mature software development framework ESP-IDF, which can bring faster and more secure IoT connection solutions to the market.

ESP32-S2 adopts an MCU + Wi-Fi design, has excellent Wi-Fi performance, and supports the 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n HT20/HT40 protocol. Together with ESP-WIFI-MESH, it can provide high-bandwidth network connections for large deployment scenarios (such as commercial lighting, smart homes, etc.). Its SDK supports a password configuration protocol, cloud connection, and reliable OTA (Over the Air Technology) software upgrade, which can help users to achieve fast firmware updates. ESP32-S2 also adds the TOF (Time of flight) ranging function of Wi-Fi data packets to improve the accuracy and stability of the wireless range.

ESP32-S2

In the Internet-of-Things era, almost all embedded systems need to deal with a large amount of data collection, analysis, visualization and other operations over the cloud. With such systems going from closed to interconnected, their security is being constantly tested. In response to this trend, ESP32-S2 customizes a variety of unique security mechanisms for connected devices, providing protection for both local and cloud encryption:

• Secure boot based on the RSA algorithm, which ensures that only trusted software is executed on the chip.
• Flash encryption based on the AES-XTS algorithm, which ensures that user-sensitive configuration data and application code on the external Flash and PSRAM of ESP32-S2 are always encrypted.
• The TLS stack can take advantage of the cryptographic accelerator hardware to improve the cloud connectivity performance.
• The security of ESP32-S2 is especially reinforced, as it resists fault injection attacks from hardware and software, while it also prevents key leakage in voltage failure.

These security measures are bound to make ESP32-S2 stand out in smart retail, smart commerce and other industries, such as more secure POS machines and other payment terminals.

It is worth highlighting that, with the ESP32-S2 chip, Espressif also provides users with an HMI (Human Machine Interface) solution that is easy to use and develop. The chip can integrate a rich set of peripherals, with 43 programmable GPIOs which can be flexibly configured as USB OTG, SPI, I2S, UART, I2C, LED PWM, LCD interface, camera interface, ADC, DAC, touch buttons, etc. The above-mentioned peripherals can serve the needs of various HMI applications and functions.

ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1

The new multimedia development board, ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1, is based on ESP32-S2 and has various functions, such as an LCD touch screen display, touch panel control, camera image acquisition, audio playback, etc. It can be flexibly assembled and disassembled, thus fulfilling a variety of customized requirements, such as:

• The LCD interface can be connected to an SPI interface, and/or an 8- /16-/ 24-bit parallel port display, in order to meet the application needs of different display resolutions in many different products.
• The touch panel of ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1 is dustproof, waterproof and has a low false-touch rate. The 14 capacitive touch interfaces that are currently supported can be designed as touch buttons, proximity sensors, sliding touch bars, scroll wheels, etc., which can be used in home touch-switches, smart-device touch panels, dimmers, etc.
• The ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1 development board also has an 8- / 16-bit DVP camera interface, and its DMA transmission bandwidth is optimized to easily transmit high-resolution images. These functions are suitable for smart-home devices, industrial wireless control, wireless monitoring, QR wireless identification, and a wide physical range of wireless coverage.

With the ESP32-S2 chips, modules and development boards going into mass production from February 2020 onwards, the functional advantages of all these products will become readily available to the entire IoT market. In the course of 2020, Espressif will launch more chips in the ESP32-S series and, at the same time, its simplified version, the ESP32-C series, will also be launched.

For more product information, please contact Espressif's Business Support.