Bluetooth Smart Wearable-on-Chip maximizes Battery Life

Dialog Semiconductor plc has released details of its DA14680 'Wearable-on-Chip' Bluetooth Smart (v4.2) device. The small, ultra-low power integrated circuit includes the key functionality to create a fully hosted wearable computing product. It features flexible processing power, flash memory for virtually unlimited execution space, dedicated circuitry for sensor control, analog and digital peripherals optimized for wearable products, and an advanced power management unit. This DA14680 eliminates several external chips from wearable product design, facilitating smaller form factors, lower system cost and lowest power consumption.

Addressing the wearable market predicted to reach approximately 170 million units by 2019, the DA14680’s ultra-low power 30uA/MHz ARM® Cortex™-M0 application processor may be programmed to a maximum clock frequency of 96 MHz. Security features include a dedicated hardware crypto engine with elliptic curve cryptology (ECC), delivering end-to-end banking-level encryption, ensuring personal data security. The device integrates 8 Mbit flash memory, audio support with PDM and I2S/PCM interfaces, two separate I2C and SPI buses, three white LED drivers, a temperature sensor, multi-channel DMA, and an 8-channel, 10-bit ADC. Intelligent power management, including system power rails and a Li-ion/LiPo battery charger and fuel gauge are also on-chip.

“The wearables market is fiercely competitive in terms of design aesthetics, cost, functionality, battery life and product life cycle. Dialog’s Bluetooth Smart Wearable-on-Chip gives our customers significant competitive advantage with respect to all of these factors, freeing them to concentrate on innovation for differentiating functionality to add to the next generation of wearables,” commented Sean McGrath, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Connectivity, Automotive & Industrial Business Group at Dialog Semiconductor. “With its feature-rich functionality, smallest size and lowest power, the DA14680 will also address other emerging IoT applications,” McGrath added.

Product development is accelerated using Dialog’s SmartBond development kits. These include the SmartSnippets™ software development environment, example application code and a power profiler for real-time, power-optimized coding. The DA14680 will be sampling in the second quarter of 2015.