By balancing trade-offs between on-chip memory and die size, Japanese electronics company Renesas has developed a Bluetooth LE system-on-chip (SoC) for connected medical, asset tracking, human interface, metering, PoS and crowd-sourced location applications.

The DA14592 device represents Renesas’ lowest power consumption and smallest, multi-core Arm Cortex-M33 and M0+ Bluetooth LE device.

It uses a low-power mode to offer 2.3mA radio transmit current at 0dBm and 1.2mA radio receive current. Additionally, it supports a hibernation current of 90nA, extending shelf-life for products shipped with battery connected, and active current at 34µA/MHz for products requiring significant application processing.

From a cost perspective, the device typically only requires six external components. Operating from only a system clock and its on-chip RCX, this device removes the need for a sleep-mode crystal in most applications.

It comes in either a 3.32 by 2.48mm WLCSP or 5.1 by 4.3mm FCQFN package, and includes a sigma-delta ADC and up to 32 GPIOs and, unlike other SoCs in its class, supports external flash or RAM expansion for applications requiring extra memory.

Renesas has integrated all external components required to implement Bluetooth LE into the DA14592MOD module. This is said to speed time to market and reduce overall project cost. Emphasis has been placed in the design of this module to ensure design flexibility by routing the DA14592’s functions to the outside of the module and using castellated pins for easy and low-cost module attachment during development.

One key application Renesas is showcasing with the DA14592 and DA14592MOD is crowd-sourced locating, a market projected to reach over $29bn in North America alone by 2031 based on Apple’s AirTag sales alone. Google recently announced plans to offer a find-my-device crowd-sourced locating network as well.

Renesas has committed to providing reference designs with low power, cost and size for both mobile operating systems as soon as Google’s find-my-device network becomes available. These reference designs will not only accelerate tag designs but enable manufacturers of products that may be lost or stolen to attach the DA14592 to their existing product to render their product globally locatable using billions of smartphones. Using the DA14592MOD will also remove the need for worldwide regulatory certifications, reducing development costs and accelerating time to market.

“The DA14592 and DA14592MOD extend our leadership in Bluetooth LE SoCs with our trademark low power consumption and best-in-class engineering BoMs,” said Davin Lee Senior, vice president at Renesas. “In addition, we have listened to our customers and continue to expand our product support by offering reference designs for applications such as crowd-sourced locating, helping our customers to more easily differentiate their products, delivering premium value while maintaining lowest costs.”

Renesas has combined the DA14592 with numerous compatible devices from its portfolio to produce an instrument panel for light electric vehicles (www.renesas.com/us/en/application/automotive/connected-infotainment/instrument-panel-light-electric-vehicles).

The DA14592 (www.renesas.com/DA14592) is in mass production with the DA14592MOD targeted for world-wide regulatory certifications in the second quarter of this year.