Broadcom Corp. (Irvine, Calif.) is introducing a Bluetooth communications chip with a Cortex-M3 microcontroller that also supports wireless charging compliant with the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) standard.
The so-called WICED chip is intended to support low-power wearable equipment that connects back to a hub, such as a smartphone via Bluetooth. It also opens up the use case where a device is too small to connect via a power cord, the company said.
The BCM20736 integrates the Bluetooth Low Energy transceiver with ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller and the RF and Bluetooth protocol stack. The device is optimized to work from a single coin cell at 1.2V.
The chip has two serial peripheral interfaces and is pin-compatible with Broadcom's existing Bluetooth Smart SoCs in a 6.5mm by 6.5mm footprint. The chip is sampling with evaluation boards and software development kits available.
"Broadcom's WICED platform is gaining significant traction with key Internet of Things innovators like Electric Imp. In addition to embedded Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Smart technology is also growing at a rapid rate and quickly becoming the core of many small, battery-operated wearable devices," said Brian Bedrosian, a senior director of embedded wireless at Broadcom.
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