'Wearable-on-Chip' IC negates design effort

This DA14680 eliminates several external chips from wearable product design, facilitating smaller form factors, lower system cost and lowest power consumption.

The wearable market is predicted to reach approximately 170m units by 2019 (Berg Insights, 2014). Addressing this, the DA14680’s low power 30μA/MHz ARM Cortex-M0 application processor may be programmed to a maximum clock frequency of 96MHz. Security features include a dedicated hardware crypto engine with Elliptic Curve Cryptology (ECC), delivering end-to-end banking-level encryption, ensuring personal data security.

The device integrates 8Mb flash memory, audio support with PDM and I2S/PCM interfaces, two separate I2C and SPI buses, three white LED drivers, a temperature sensor, multi-channel DMA, and an 8-channel, 10-bit ADC. Intelligent power management, including system power rails and a Li-ion/LiPo battery charger and fuel gauge are also on-chip.

“The wearables market is fiercely competitive in terms of design aesthetics, cost, functionality, battery life and product life cycle. Dialog’s Bluetooth Smart Wearable-on-Chip gives our customers significant competitive advantage with respect to all of these factors, freeing them to concentrate on innovation for differentiating functionality to add to next-gen wearables,” commented Sean McGrath, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Automotive & Industrial Connectivity, Dialog Semiconductor. “With its feature-rich functionality, smallest size and lowest power, the DA14680 will also address other emerging IoT applications.”

Product development is accelerated using Dialog’s SmartBond development kits. These include the SmartSnippets software development environment, example application code and a power profiler for real-time, power-optimised coding. The DA14680 will be available for sampling in the second quarter of 2015.