Renesas Unveils Its "Lowest Power Consumption" Dual-Core Flash-Equipped BLE Chip, the DA14592
With two Arm Cortex-M33F cores, an Arm Cortex-M0+, and BLE capabilities, Renesas hopes its new chip will power location tags and more.
Embedded electronics specialist Renesas has announced what it claims is its "lowest power consumption" system-on-chip to include a dual-core processor, Bluetooth 5.2 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, and integrated flash memory: the DA14592, also available as the DA14592MOD system-on-module.
“The DA14592 and DA14592MOD extend our leadership in Bluetooth LE SoCs with our trademark low power consumption and best-in-class eBOMs [engineering Bills of Materials]," claims Renesas' Davin Lee of the company's latest launch. "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 locationing, helping our customers to more easily differentiate their products, delivering premium value while maintaining lowest costs."
That promise of "best-in-class eBOMs" comes from a claim that in a typical design the DA14592 can be used with only six external components, while the company's claims of low power draw are supported by measurements demonstrating a 2.3mA current draw while transmitting at 0dBm, 1.2mA while receiving, a 90nA hibernation mode, and an active current measured at 34µA per megahertz of CPU clock.
The chip includes three processor cores: a dual-core Arm Cortex-M33F as its primary cores and a Cortex-M0+ core as a configurable MAC. There's 96kB of static RAM, 256kB of on-chip flash, 288kB of ROM, and a quad-SPI bus for external flash or RAM expansion. There are up to 32 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, a sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and a Bluetooth 5.2 Low Energy (BLE) radio.
This latter feature is used by Rensas in a reference design for crowdsourced location tracking, as found in products like Apple's AirTag family. "These reference designs will not only accelerate tag designs," the company claims, "but will also enable manufacturers of products that may be lost or stolen to easily attach the DA14592 to their existing product to render their product globally locatable utilizing billions of smartphones, thereby differentiating their products and enhancing end-customer value."
The DA14592 is now available to order from the Renesas website, with pricing starting at $4.35 per chip before volume discounts; the DA14592MOD is awaiting regulatory certification, Renesas has said, with approval expected in the second quarter of the year. A development kit, the DA1459 DEVKIT-PRO, will also be made available.