New-Tech Europe Digital Magazine | Feb 2016

16.9x23.7x1.00 mm printed circuit board and a 70 mAh CR1016 coin cell battery. About the author: Mr. Mark de Clercq, Product Marketing Group Manager at Dialog Semiconductor Mark joined Dialog Semiconductor in 2007 as Product Marketing Group Manager. Prior to this he was a design engineer at Phillips Electronics and held research and teaching posts at McGill University, where he took his Masters in Microelectronics. He has also studied strategic marketing at the Harvard Business School. In his spare time Mark enjoys getting out on his bike, self-tracking his progress using the latest app- enabled Bluetooth ® accessory. Figure 3: DA14580 Bluetooth Smart beacon reference design implemented in a small, tough polyurethane enclosure

Figure 2: Dialog Semiconductor DA14580 simplified block diagram

Bluetooth Smart radio with an ARM ® Cortex™-M0 application processor and intelligent power management. The processor and on-chip digital and analogue peripherals are accessible via up to 32 GPIOs. The device block diagram is shown in Figure 2. Excluding any current limiting resistors needed for buzzers or LEDs, Dialog’s DA14580 beacon reference design needs only 12 external components: 6 capacitors, a 16 MHz crystal, 3 inductors and 3 resistors. The device, which is available in either a 2.5x2.5x0.5 mm WL-CSP or 5x5x0.9 mm QFN40 package, has a peak current consumption of 4.8 mA at 3 volts when transmitting at 0 dBm and this falls to 1.4 µA in extended sleep mode and less than 0.7 µA in deep sleep mode with memory retention. Each advertising event consumes 9.53 µC (total for all 3 channels). Receiver sensitivity is -93 dBm. Figure 3 shows the reference design implemented in a polyurethane enclosure measuring 20.3x39.9x5.8 mm. Inside the enclosure, is a

three advertising channels normally used. Also, you need to consider the processor resources that may be available for application code within the Bluetooth Smart SoC. If it’s possible to produce a completely hosted solution without resorting to an external microcontroller, this will again save design time, cost and space. In selecting a Bluetooth Smart radio, other important considerations are sometimes overlooked. Functional integration will determine how many external components are needed to create the beacon. The fewer you need, the less design effort is required and the lower the cost of the end product. Fewer components also means you can make smaller products that will be more reliable. Design effort is also reduced if the Bluetooth Smart vendor offers a reference design and proven software. A Bluetooth Smart beacon reference design Dialog Semiconductor’s DA14580 “SmartBond” SoC integrates a

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