The ESP32-C5 is Espressif's first dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and BLE RISC-V part for the Internet of Things.

 Espressif's newest component is its first to connect to both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi 6, and it was created with the Internet of Things in mind.

The ESP32-C5 from Espressif is the company's first RISC-V chip and, according to the company, the first in the industry to enable dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connection.

The ESP32-C5 is Espressif's newest system-on-chip (SoC) built on the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture, which the company recently announced it would be using for all parts going forward. It follows the release of the ESP32-C3 and cost-reduced ESP32-C2, skipping the ESP32-C4 moniker entirely. The CPU, a single-core 32-bit RISC-V component, has 400 kB of static RAM (SRAM), 384 kB of ROM, and support for external flash storage. It operates at up to 240 MHz.

So far, the ESP32-C5 is quite similar to its predecessors; nevertheless, it varies from them in terms of connection. The component is Espressif's first RISC-V SoC to enable 802.11b/g/n with a 20/40MHz switchable bandwidth for backwards compatibility in addition to Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) connection on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

This capabilities puts it above the ESP32-C6 component the business released last year, which only provided 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connectivity, which is a little surprising considering their relative number suffixes. The ESP32-C5's CPU runs at 240MHz as opposed to the ESP32-C6's maximum speed of 160MHz. But the ESP32-C6 has a hardware cryptography block that its younger, lower-numbered sister lacks.

Over 20 programmable general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, an SDIO 2.0 Slave interface, an on-board temperature sensor, SPI and UART buses, and an analogue to digital converter are all included in the ESP32-C5 (ADC). In order to improve battery life under bursty workloads, the company claims to have modified its design with the Internet of Things in mind. This includes adding orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for uplink and downlink, multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) for downlink connections, and support for Wi-Fi 6's target wait time (TWT) feature.

Espressif has confirmed that ESP-IDF, ESP-AT, and ESP-Hosted are now compatible with the ESP32-C5 for use as a communication coprocessor. However, Espressif has not provided a shipping date or price information, instead directing interested parties to get in touch with its sales team for more details.