Bluetooth Smart radio targets IoT applications

With a power consumption up to five times lower than state of the art radios and an ultra small memory footprint, the device is aimed at personal health monitoring systems and smart home applications. The 1.9nJ/bit solution integrates imec and Holst Centre's 2.4GHz short range radio with Wicentric's exactLE product line of Bluetooth Smart software. imec claims it is three to five times more power efficient than similar solutions on the market. Running from a 1.2V supply, the receiver consumes 3.8mW and the transmitter consumes 4.6mW. The measured receiver noise figure is 6dB, resulting in a sensitivity of -98dBm for Bluetooth Low Energy. Wicentric's software solution includes exactLE Link, a portable link layer for Bluetooth Smart, and its qualified exactLE stack and profiles. The stack and profiles support 18 standard Bluetooth Smart profiles and services for products such as physical activity monitors, healthcare devices and smart watches. The company claims the combined code size of the link layer, protocol stack and profile can be as low as 4kbyte on an ARM Cortex-M0 cpu, running at 12 to 16MHz.