Bluetooth 5 has been around for over a year, so what SoCs are currently available?

With the rise of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the form factor of Bluetooth chips has also undergone a significant transformation. Faced with numerous low-power, compact applications, chip manufacturers began to consider integrating the main controller and radio frequency (RF) functions into a single chip, forming a BLE SoC . This has brought great convenience to developers.

Following the release of Bluetooth 5 at the end of 2016, manufacturers rushed to "catch up," launching chip products that comply with the new specifications. We have collected information on nearly 20 Bluetooth 5 chips released by 7 representative manufacturers over the past year , summarizing them to facilitate component selection and hopefully reveal some trend insights.

These products reveal that developing "series" of products based on segmented application markets has become a common strategy for some leading manufacturers . For example, both TI and NXP have developed automotive-grade products based on their standard product versions, such as TI's CC2640R2F-Q1 and NXP's KW35Z/36Z.

Nordic has launched three products covering different market segments, especially the nRF52810, which was first launched in China last year. It is considered to be a Bluetooth 5 SoC with excellent cost performance and is very much to the liking of Chinese customers.

Figure 1. Nordic's series of SoCs supporting Bluetooth 5 (Source: Nordic Semiconductor)

This rapid formation of a "series" is due to two main factors: firstly, the market experience accumulated during the Bluetooth 4.x era, and secondly, the platformization of product development. Whether it's TI's SimpleLink, NXP's Kinetis W, or Nordic's nRF52 series, these are all very mature wireless MCU platforms. By configuring hardware and upgrading software on these platforms, new products can be quickly iterated upon.

Furthermore, we have observed an acceleration in the development of dual-core processors. While running network protocols and applications simultaneously on a single processor core will remain the preferred option for simple, low-cost applications, the expanding and diversifying applications of Bluetooth will undoubtedly necessitate stronger computing power. Dual-core architectures will thus gain increasing market share, and through proper resource allocation, system power consumption can be effectively controlled. ST, TI, and NXP have all launched corresponding products in this area.

Figure 2 shows the system block diagram of TI's CC2640R2F, which uses a dual-core architecture (Source: TI).

Meanwhile, support for multiple protocols is also a trend in the definition of Bluetooth 5 chip products , especially support for protocols such as ZigBee and Thread, which belong to IEEE 802.15.4, which will provide greater room for imagination in application development.

Figure 3 shows NXP's latest K32W0x wireless MCU, which features a dual-core architecture and supports multiple wireless protocols including Bluetooth 5, ZigBee, and Thread (Source: NXP).

Furthermore, manufacturers are pulling out all the stops to improve the aesthetics of their products in areas such as security, dedicated function circuits, low power consumption, analog functionality, and interface resources. You can find this information in the product comparison table below, or by referring to the latest product datasheets.

It should be noted that some parameters listed in the table below are related to the working status and testing conditions. Due to space limitations, they are not explained in detail. You can obtain more detailed information from the manufacturer's official website.

Table 1. Bluetooth 5 SoC Hardware Architecture and Supported Communication Protocols (Products marked in green are in the sample stage)

Table 2. Bluetooth 5 SoC RF Performance (Products marked in green are in the sample stage)

Table 3. Low power characteristics of Bluetooth 5 SoC (products marked in green are in the sample stage)