Is Smart Bluetooth de facto standard for IoT Wearable, Beacons, Fitness and Health ?

By SemiWiki

March 15, 2016

Synopsys launch BTLE PHY IP, qualified by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) and meeting compliance with the Bluetooth® Smart v4.2 specification. The company has built a partnership with Mindtree to provide a complete solution, integrating Synopsys’ Bluetooth Smart PHY IP and Mindtree’s production-proven BlueLitE link layer and software stack IP. The PHY IP has been developed on TSMC 55nm (and 180 nm) and is currently ported on TSMC 40 nm. Synopsys’ marketers think that the semiconductor content of IoT edge systems like wearable, beacons, fitness or health should be low cost to see a strong adoption. By low cost, they mean a few dollars and definitely less than 5$ for the semiconductor content.

But the selected technology node (55 nm) also means relatively low development cost, at least much, much lower than on 28 or even 22 nm. Here we have to remember the low complexity of an IoT edge device: a sensor providing a small amount of data to a MCU, once processed the data to be wirelessly transmitted via on-chip BTLE protocol to the gateway. You simply don’t want to target an aggressive technology node and invest a huge amount of money in development cost for such a relatively simple system, comparable to a 2$ MCU in term of complexity.

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