BLE SoC manages multi-sensor arrays

Article By : Graham Prophet

The DA14681 supports Bluetooth 4.2 standard and its integrated PMU provides three independent power rails for external system components.

Dialog Semiconductor's SmartBond DA14681 balances performance and power efficiency, delivering high-power processing when it’s needed—up to 96MHz from its ARM Cortex M0 processor—and saving power when it isn’t, by consuming less than 1µA when in standby. This suits it for managing multi-sensor arrays and enables always-on sensing.

According to the company, the SmartBond DA14681 includes highest performance, lowest power consumption, smallest footprint and lowest system cost for creation of IoT devices, spanning wearables, smart home and other emerging IoT concepts.

The DA14681 supports the latest Bluetooth 4.2 standard, and its integrated Power Management Unit (PMU) provides three independent power rails to supply external system components, in addition to an on-chip charger and fuel gauge, allowing DA14681 to recharge batteries over a USB interface. Due to its unique architecture, it is able to power a complete IoT system without the need for additional external power management circuitry.

Joining the company’s DA14680, the DA14681 offers virtually unlimited computing space to software application developers by enabling the latter to expand the size of their code execution space through a flexible external memory interface. It can execute code from an external flash or OTP memory for maximum design freedom, with expandable execution space for applications. To complete the package, Dialog has designed the SoC to feature banking-level security with a dedicated hardware crypto engine to keep personal data safe and enable end-to-end application encryption.

The DA14681 is already shipping in high volume at tier one OEMs for applications including wearables and virtual reality (VR), according to Dialog.