Wireless microcontroller targets Bluetooth Smart applications

This post is sponsored by Texas Instruments. The Texas Instruments CC2640 is a member of the CC26xx family of cost-effective, ultra low-power 2.4GHz RF devices. Very low active RF and MCU current, and low-power mode current consumption provides long battery lifetime and allow operation on small coin-cell batteries and in energy-harvesting applications. The CC2640 contains a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 processor running at 48MHz as the main processor and a rich peripheral feature set, including a unique ultra-low power sensor controller, ideal for interfacing external sensors and/or collecting analog and digital data autonomously while the rest of the system is in sleep mode. This makes the CC2640 ideal for a wide range of applications where long battery lifetime, small form factor, and ease of use is important. The Bluetooth Low Energy controller is embedded into ROM and run partly on an ARM Cortex-M0 processor. This architecture improves overall system performance and power consumption and frees up flash memory for the application. The Bluetooth Smart stack is available free of charge from TI, says the company.