BLE MCUs incorporate baluns feature new power-saving operation mode

STMicroelectronics has extended its STM32WB* Bluetooth LE microcontroller (MCU) offering with new devices that combine entry-level features with extra power savings for longer-lasting performance.

The dual-core STM32WB15 and STM32WB10 Value Line pair an Arm Cortex-M4 processor to run the main application and a Cortex-M0+ to handle Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, ensuring real-time performance from each. The radio stage has a 102dBm link budget to ensure reliable connections over long distances and integrates balun circuitry to save board space and reduce the bill of materials.

With a new ultra-power-saving mode that allows the radio to remain operational, and carefully tailored peripherals and memory, the new devices are suited to cost-sensitive, power-conscious embedded applications including wearables, beacons, smart circuit breakers, trackers, IoT endpoints, and equipment for industrial automation.

The Software Development Kit (SDK) for each MCU includes standardized radio protocol stacks and openness to proprietary protocols with a set of security mechanisms that ensure safe software updates for brand protection and device integrity, with Proprietary Code Read-Out Protection (PCROP) to guard intellectual property.

With these new devices, the STM32WB series scales across package variants, offering options including extended GPIOs and pin-to-pin compatibility between similar packages of the portfolio. Customers can easily migrate designs between devices to take advantage of different features and memory densities, leveraging pin-compatibility across packages.

The development ecosystem includes STM32Cube certified radio stacks that support various profiles, software expansion packs and sample code, the STM32CubeMX configurator and initialization code generator, the STM32CubeIDE development environment, a powerful STM32CubeMonitor-RF evaluation tool, and associated Nucleo hardware tools.

The STM32WB15 and STM32WB10 Value Line MCUs are in production now, offering various pin-compatible configurations in the QFN48 package, priced from $1.3986 for orders of 10000 pieces.