STMicro's New STM32WB09 Aims to Get You Up and Running with New Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy Features
New optimized design includes radio power fine-tuning and support for the latest Bluetooth features, including direction and range finding.
STMicroelectronics has announced a new microcontroller, with module and evaluation board to match, which it hopes will make it easier to get started designing smart Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) devices: the STM32WB09 microcontroller and STM32WB1MMC module.
The STM32WB09 is a radio-equipped microcontroller built around the Arm Cortex-M0+ core running at 64MHz, with 64kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 512kB of flash memory on-chip. While it enters into the existing STM32WB0 family, the '09 is claimed to include specifically tailored memory and peripherals for wireless sensing, connected wearables, and remote control projects.
The radio in the system-on-chip is, STMicro says, fully compatible with the advanced features of the Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy standard — which means support for direction and distance finding for real-time location tracking, indoor positioning, and item-finding applications, with power control opens for 1dBm-step radio output to boost battery life and reduce interference in a congested spectrum.
On the microcontroller side, the chip offers up to 20 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, all capable of waking the chip from sleep and boasting 5V tolerance, a 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) with eight input channels, SPI with I2S multiplexed, I2C, USART, low-power UART, a real-time clock, one 16-bit four-channel and two 16-bit two-channel general-purpose timers, and infrared interface, battery monitoring, an analog watchdog, and Serial Wide Debug (SWD) support.
For those who don't fancy trying to build a board around a bare chip, the new part is also available as the STM32WB1MMC module. This combines the certified microcontroller with all the required external components to get the radio up and running. For the quickest of possible starts, meanwhile, there's the B-WB1M-WPAN1 evaluation board — which is ready-to-go out of the box, STMicro promises, and includes motion, temperature, and pressure sensors on-board.
STMicro has confirmed pricing for the STM32WB09 chip at $1.36 in a QFN32 package for "high-volume OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer]" customers, and the STM32WB1MMC module at $5.32 in 10,000-unit quantities; the development board, meanwhile, is priced at $30 — in, thankfully, single-unit volume. More information is available on the STMicro website.