Whats New in TI BLE
We now have a fully qualified Bluetooth® 5 solution for our customers to start developing today and go to production.Three key questions you will be able to answer after viewing this video:Q1. Which TI chips currently support Bluetooth® 5?Q2. Which features of Bluetooth® 5 are you currently supporting?Q3. Can I test all Bluetooth® 5 PHY's today?
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Hi. My name is Erling Simensen. And I'll be going through what's new in TI BLE for May 2017. I'll start by looking at our latest BLE chipset, the CC2640R2. I will then go through what new features are included in Bluetooth 5. I will take a quick look at our automotive qualified BLE solution. I will talk about the two BLE stacks that we are currently offering for our 2640R2. And I will be mentioning SmartRF Studio, which now supports Bluetooth 5 testing without any software development required.
The CC2640R2 is unique in many ways. First, our DNA has always been low power. The 2640R2 is no exception. It uses 1 microamp in sleep mode, with RTC and full memory retention. And it uses around 6 milliamps in receive and transmit. It is a very long-range solution, with a minus 97 dBm sensitivity for the regular BLE data rate, which will get you more than a 100-meter line-of-sight range. With the new Bluetooth 5 long-range mode we have shown that we can get 1.5 kilometers of range in an outdoor open environment.
The 2640R2 is a flexible RF platform, so you can choose between a reference design that has very few components and you do a small trade-off on RF performance, or you can use a more extensive reference design to optimize, receive, and transmit performance. The chip is also part of a scalable wireless MCU platform, so you have sister chips that are both in the several gigahertz band, we have a dual-band chip with both sub 1 and 2.4, and we also have a roadmap to larger memory devices.
The 2640R2 supports full Bluetooth 4.2 and multi role. This means that the device can be either a BLE central, or it can be a peripheral, it can change between the two on the fly, and it can handle multiple connections. Our device and our stack offering enables you to connect eight devices together without any problems.
If you want to do system partitioning, we have a simple network processor image available as part of the BLE stack. So basically, you would run the whole stack on our device, and just communicate with a simple API, or SPI or UART. We have a full beacon offering, so both iBeacon and Eddystone. We have a software example for voice or BLE, with over HID over GATT. It's used for remote controls.
We have a cap touch solution. So there there's a sensor controller on the 2640R2. And we have code example there where we can do up to eight buttons cap touch, or a slider. We have a Bluetooth 5 stack out on the web in April-May. So it's already out there. You see the QDID. And it's the first single mode Bluetooth 5 ready solution that also supports the 2 megabit high data rate mode. Last but not least, we have a certified homekit solution available for this chip.
As an addition to the platform, we also have a package option which is Q100 certified. So the temperature range is Grade 2 up to under 105 degrees C. And it has a wettable flanks QFN package. So some example applications are car access, and car sharing, and a couple of others on the list here.
So what's new with Bluetooth 5? With Bluetooth 5 there are three distinct new features that you should know about. First is the long-range mode. So basically this enables up to 6 dB improved sensitivity. What this means is we've shown that you can do up to more than a kilometer of range outdoors, but also important you can do a full-house coverage application going through from one room to the next, and going through a couple of walls.
There is a high data rate mode, going from 1 megabit to 2 megabits, and this is a 500% increase versus Bluetooth 4.0. The 2640R2 also supports even higher throughput of up to 5 megabits. But that's proprietary and not part of the Bluetooth specification as of today. There is advertisement extensions, which enables increased broadcasting capacity. With this new functionality, you can send up to 248 bytes of payloads in a beacon.
So let's go into the technical details a bit. So the long-range mode is basically using forward error correction and coding the bits, either in a 1-to-2 or a 1-to-4 manner, which enables better receive sensitivity. So the current consumption remains the same, but you do get the added sensitivity that you trade for the lower data rate.
So the numbers for 2640R2 are the following. The TX power doesn't change, but the sensitivity changes. So at 1 mega-bps we are at minus 97 dBm. At 500 kilo-bps we are minus 101 dBm, and at 125 kilo-bps we are at minus 103 dBm. So that's how you get the 6 dB improved link budget at the same current consumption.
The high data rate mode is a doubling of the data rate versus the data rate used Bluetooth 4.x. And you can see what this translates to between the different versions of Bluetooth Low Energy. So in the 4.0-4.1 spec, the data rate was 1 mega-bps per second, and the packet payload was up to 27 bytes. And this enabled up to 305 kilo-bps of throughput.
In Bluetooth 4.2, there was the data length extension property that was introduced, where you can have up to around 250 bytes of packet payload. And this enabled, with the same data rate, a throughput of up to 780 kilo-bps per second. In Bluetooth 5, we still have this same data length extension. But the over-the-air data rate is increased to 2 mega-bps per second. So the application throughput can be up to 1.4 mega-bps per second.
The advertisement extension is an advanced feature that is enabling more data to be sent in beacons. So normally beacons are sent on the primary channels-- 37, 38, or 39. But in order to avoid congestion of these channels, the advertisement extension feature was introduced. So what happens is that on the primary channel, you send a small pointer to a data channel with a time. So the rest of the payload is actually sent on the data channel. So this enables up to 248 bytes of payload data to be sent in a beacon. So it's not sent on the advertisement channels, but it's sent on a data channel that is specified by the pointer that is sent on the advertisement channel. If that was complex, take a look at the figure on the screen. And I hope you figure it out.
So, why is long-range important? Obviously, going outdoors and having more than a kilometer of range is interesting. But just as important is reliable communication within the home. So an example is a door lock. You would want to reach that door lock from wherever you are in the house. And that's something you can most likely do with BLE 5 long-range mode system.
So for faster data rates, there also some use cases. Audio is one of them. With audio and higher data rate, you have shorter on-air time and shorter transmit times. So you will most likely experience fewer interruptions to the audio. In addition to audio, think about other applications like over-the-air updates of firmware, or any type of data dump that you need to do over a link. Obviously, faster data rates can be very useful.
Advertisement extensions is really a key for more advanced beacons. So we have to wait until the phones support Bluetooth 5 and long-range mode. But when they do, they can receive up to around 250 bytes, instead of just 30 bytes of information. And that obviously enables more personalized experience. And for connection-less beacons, it's easier to send more data to a large number of nodes than before.
So, let's talk a little bit about TI's BLE stack offering. So the latest SDK for 2640R2 is the SDK version 1.35. And it contains two stacks, both a Bluetooth 4.2 stack and the Bluetooth 5.0 stack. So the reason for this is we know that many customers want to have a feature stable Bluetooth core 4.2 stack, and we proposed that as part of the Bluetooth stack 3.0.1 that's currently part of the SDK. So if you want to stay feature stable on 4.2, you can use this stack and we will release any bug fixes that we find as we go through 2017 and beyond.
We will have some feature upgrades. So we will propose secure firmware upgrades, enhanced OAD, and also some automotive specific features. But those will not affect the fact that it's a Bluetooth core 4.2 compliant stack. The Bluetooth 5 stack that we have released in April this year, supports the Bluetooth core 5.0 feature sets, in addition to the high data rate mode. We have also included a long-range test mode. But this mode, it doesn't support yet the long-range mode over the long range connections. That's something that we will introduce later this year. Because we need both the advertisement extensions and the long-range mode in the stack. So that's coming, and we will be certifying this after summer 2017.
So, in order to get started, you need to order a 2640R2 launch pad, and you go to ti.com/ble to download the SDK. And from there, you can start to develop on both of these stacks.
Last, I want to mention a tool that we have, called SmartRF Studio. And you see the link to download it here. So with this tool, you basically take a launchpad and you connect it to your PC, and you're able to transmit, receive, and do link test on all Bluetooth 5 PHYs. So as you can see here, the 1 mega-bps mode, the 2 mega-bps mode, the long-range mode using 500 the kilo-bps and the 125 kilo-bps mode. So you can do basic range testing, and you can also test your design that it works in an appropriate manner with this tool.
So with that, I want to wish you good luck with your developments. And the TI BLE offering is part of the SimpleLink platform, which means that the software SDK is common across all our wireless technologies and MCU. The development kit with launchpad is common, and the booster packs that we have. You will find all your code in TI Resource Explorer. We use Code Composer Studio as one of the IDEs that we support. And for training, you can check out SimpleLink Academy, where we offer everything from getting started lessons on our Bluetooth SDK to more advanced things like sensor controller, building your custom BLE peripheral, et cetera. Thank you.