STMicroelectronics has introduced a third generation of Bluetooth chip, describing it as “the world’s first Bluetooth LE 5.2-certified SoC to support concurrent connections up to 128 nodes”.

ST-BlueNRG-LP

Called BlueNRG-LP, according o the company it can consume as little as 3.4mA in receive mode, 4.3mA when transmitting, and under 500nA when quietly waiting for wake-up events.

RF output power is programmable up to +8dBm, and receive sensitivity can be up to -104dBm, and the device is compatible with Bluetooth LE Mesh – as well as Bluetooth Long Range mode which uses coded physical layers with forward error connection to extend radio range to to hundreds of meters. GATT (generic attribute) caching is available for connection.

Extended range is predicted to be of use in beacons, smart lighting, gaming, building automation, industrial and tracking applications.

The associated protocol stack is provided without payment as a compiler-independent linkable library supported by multiple IDEs (integrated development environments). It supports features such as extended advertising and scanning, high-duty-cycle non-connectable advertising, extended packet length, and 2Mbit/s throughput.

BlueNRG-LP also supports L2CAP CoC (connection-oriented channel), which eases large bidirectional data transfers, multi-role simultaneous connectivity, and CSA #2 (channel selection algorithm 2), which permits robust connections in noisy environments such as home, building, or industrial networks.

The integrated 64MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ MCU is supported by security features including secure bootloader, readout protection for the entire 256kbyte embedded flash, a 48bit unique ID, customer key storage, true random number generator, hardware public-key acceleration and a 128-bit AES cryptographic co-processor.

Processor power consumption is 18µA/MHz.

Its other preripherals include a multi-channel 12bit ADC, an analogue microphone interface with programmable gain amplifier, user timers, system timers, a watchdog and up to 31 5V-tolerant user-programmable I-O pins.

Then there is an embedded RF balun, a dc-dc converter and capacitors for the high-speed external oscillator and internal low-speed ring oscillator.

ST-BlueNRG-LP-more-of-photoAs it was so lovely, here is some more of the photo that ST supplied with the surrounding information, which looks a lot like Mont Saint Michel in Normandy

Options for the Bluetooth transceiver include:

• 32 or 64kbyte of ram
• operation up to 85°C or 105°C
• 5 x 5mm QFN32
• 6 x 6mm QFN48 (available now)
• 3.14 x 3.14mm WLCSP49

Devices are covered by ST’s 10 year industrial longevity commitment.