Dialog expands its Bluetooth Smart SoC portfolio for iot applications

     Dialog Semiconductor Corporation announced the addition of three new products to its successful line of ultra-low power Smart Bluetooth SOCs - the DA14581, DA14582 and DA14583. They are currently the smallest and lowest power wireless connectivity solutions for wireless charging and remote control (RCU) applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) and are targeted specifically for high-volume, high-growth application markets.

     Sean McGrath, senior vice President and general manager of the Connected, Automotive & Industrial Business Unit at Dialog Semiconductors, said: "Our first SmartBond device, the DA14580, has been a success in Human Machine interface devices (HID), proximity sensing, medical electronics and smart home applications thanks to its ultra-small size and ultra-low power consumption, and has helped us achieve market leadership. We have every reason to believe that subsequent models of the DA14580 will continue to help customers achieve their design goals quickly and reliably and continue to be popular in the market."

     "In the wireless charging and RCU markets, Bluetooth low energy is the ideal protocol for control and communication due to its ubiquity on smartphones, tablets, smart TVS and many other consumer devices. As we expand our SmartBond portfolio, we will continue to make it easier for customers to integrate these ultra-low-power, fully managed Bluetooth solutions, enabling their products to deliver unmatched battery life to consumers."

     The DA14581 is optimized for loosely coupled, highly resonant inductive charging based on the A4WP standard. To guarantee charging reliability under all conditions, including battery failure, the DA14581 is capable of starting within 50 milliseconds when used in the receiving unit. When used in a power transmission unit, the device is optimized to simultaneously track and control the charging process of eight devices. Hci-optimized code, which provides standardized communication between host stacks and controllers, can now be programmed into one-time programmable (OTP) memory, enabling users to develop pre-programmed HCI products for use with external microcontrollers and third-party stacks. According to a report by market analyst firm Darnell, wireless charging receiver and transmitter chip sales will reach $2.8 billion by 2020.

     The DA14582 is optimized for RCU using speech recognition as well as motion and gesture recognition technology to control the next generation of smart TVS and set-top boxes, with integrated analog audio codecs and native support for microphones. As set-top boxes and Smart TVS begin to have built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Smart capabilities, Bluetooth Smart is replacing Bluetooth Classic (regular Bluetooth) in remote control devices due to lower power consumption and shorter connection latency.

     The third new device, the DA14583, is a SmartBond SoC with 1 Mbit (128 kByte) flash memory. This is a flash version of the DA14580 that enables customers to keep their products up to date with over-the-air (OTA) software upgrades. The device is pin-compatible with the DA14580 OTP version. This enables design engineers to save money when transitioning from flash to OTP versions as their applications mature, especially if they need OTA upgrades in development and early production.

     The SmartBond SoC integrates an ARM® Cortex™-M0 Bluetooth Low Energy radio receiver with an application processor and intelligent power management capabilities. Building a complete Bluetooth Smart solution requires only five peripheral components, which provide unmatched system integration and the lowest power consumption in the world. The device's ARM Cortex M0 processor and full suite of digital and analog peripherals are accessible through up to 32 GPIOs, making it ideal for all Bluetooth Smart applications. Since the launch of the DA14580 with the best power performance on the market in January 2014, Dialog has achieved a 20% power reduction across all products in this product family.

     The SmartBond development kit comes with a power profiler to support power-optimized programming and Dialog's SmartSnippets™ software development environment based on Keil™ 's µVision tool. The toolkit also includes sample application code for embedded and managed modes to help speed up product development.