Espressif Begins Mass Production of the ESP32-S31 With Wi-Fi 6, Thread, Zigbee, and Enhanced Edge AI Capabilities

Espressif Systems has announced that the ESP32-S31 microcontroller has entered mass production and is now commercially available, marking an important milestone for embedded developers and the maker community. The new chip is designed to consolidate advanced networking, processing, and multimedia capabilities into a single platform, reducing the need for multiple companion chips in complex IoT projects. The ESP32-S31 features a dual-core 32-bit RISC-V processor running at up to 320 MHz, with one core supporting a 128-bit SIMD data path to accelerate demanding workloads such as machine learning inference and digital signal processing. It includes 512 KB of on-chip SRAM and supports up to 250 MHz DDR PSRAM for memory-intensive applications. The microcontroller integrates Wi-Fi 6 in the 2.4 GHz band, Bluetooth 5.4 with both Classic and Low Energy support, and IEEE 802.15.4 connectivity for Thread and Zigbee, while also supporting the Matter smart home standard. It further adds a Gigabit Ethernet MAC, making it suitable for industrial IoT gateways and devices requiring reliable wired networking. Multimedia features include a camera interface, LCD display support with hardware color conversion, audio capabilities, and multiple capacitive touch channels, making it well suited for vision, voice, and intelligent edge AI applications. Espressif has also introduced two development boards based on the ESP32-S31-WROOM-3 module. The CoreBoard-1 targets general-purpose development, while the Korvo-1 focuses on multimedia and AI projects with an integrated display, microphones, speaker connectivity, and camera. Both are supported through the ESP-IDF framework, with Arduino compatibility still under development.