The rise of wearables, smart homes and the Internet of Things has made Bluetooth more popular with vendors. According to the IHS report, shipments of Bluetooth smart devices will increase from 165 million in 2014 to 1.2 billion in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 64%. According to statistics, in 2014, 61% of Bluetooth smart devices have introduced Bluetooth modules, and the Bluetooth module brings many conveniences for intelligent hardware development and design.
What convenience does the introduction of the Bluetooth module bring to the design of intelligent hardware? Let's see what the experts say. Mr. Zhu Xionghui, currently the regional marketing manager of Cypress, said:
1. The biggest benefit of the low-power Bluetooth module to customers is that it can significantly reduce the time-to-market for customers. Just as Cypress has wirelessly certified its Bluetooth module in many countries around the world, the product only needs the final customer to go to the relevant organization to make a shape statement to use the Bluetooth logo. Customers can save up to six months or more. At the same time, the Cypress Bluetooth low energy module can help customers' Bluetooth products reduce international certification fees.
2, low-power Bluetooth module to ensure that the product performance indicators are guaranteed. Especially for the RF performance, the customer does not need to invest in manpower and resources to develop and test the matching design of the antenna and the anti-jamming design of the PCB. These are particularly attractive to complete machine manufacturers who lack RF design capabilities and have high requirements for product reliability.
3. The low-power Bluetooth module is powerful and small. Cypress's low-power Bluetooth module is a strong proof of this. Cypress's low-power Bluetooth module 10x10 is as large as a regular chip and can be easily placed into any mini embedded device. At the same time with an open ARM M0 MCU, not only wireless RF, but also a small system design; with CapSense function, it can be convenient for capacitive touch and proximity sensing; with Flash structure, you can reconfigure the firmware at will; Resources such as TImer, PWM are used by the system.
Mr. Zhu Xionghui graduated from Xidian University with a master's degree in computer science and technology. He is currently the regional marketing manager for Cypress, responsible for the market expansion of the Cypress DCD product line.
Since the small Bluetooth module has so many advantages for intelligent hardware design, how to make better use of the Bluetooth module and get the smart hardware products you expect? There are the following points you need to pay attention to.
1. If the customer just thinks of it as a BLE RF, then the design only needs to pay attention to the customer's MCU and the interface of the module is I2C, SPI or UART. Different firmware can be programmed into the module according to the available MCU interface. But like all wireless product designs, be careful that the antenna of the module is not shielded by metal.
2. If the customer uses the module as a MCU for small system design, such as BLE remote control, mouse, etc., the MCU in the module and the corresponding GPIO will be used. Zhu Xionghui particularly stressed: "In this case, you can use the Cypress integrated development environment PSoC Creator to configure and program the system."
Of course, power consumption and size are also major issues that current wearable devices have to consider. This also puts higher requirements on the design of the Bluetooth module. In terms of size, Cypress's experience is very worth learning. The Cypress module has achieved 10x10x1.8mm. Manager Zhu pointed out: "We have to do a lot of work on PCB and various device selections to get the size so small. The power consumption depends on the effective power management of the BLE chip in the module. For this, Cypress BLE The chip provides five different operating modes, such as 60nA in Stop mode, 150nA in Hibernate mode, and 1.3μA in Deep-sleep mode. This design can meet the most demanding requirements. Low power requirements."
Cypress EZ-BLE PRoC module size view
Regarding the present and future of the Bluetooth module, Zhu Xionghui elaborated: Cypress is the only manufacturer that has both chips and modules. Based on the understanding of the chip, its Bluetooth module can play the performance and advantages of the chip. As the first BLE module of Cypress, EZ-BLE PRoC is mainly used in IoT applications such as smart home, remote control, and various instruments that need to manage peripherals with mobile phones. It can be used not only as pure RF but also as MCU+RF. Secondly, with the capacitive touch sensor on the top, it can be used as a capacitive button and proximity sensor, so it is suitable for touch button design of smart table lamps, smart fans and the like. The module enables many smart devices to be available globally in a short time, plus capacitive touch and other auxiliary functions (ADC, TCPWM), allowing the series of modules to be recognized by customers in a very short time and used for design . In the near future, Cypress will have a variety of different Bluetooth low-power modules available. The larger series will be divided into PRoC-BLE and PSoC-BLE, and will support wider temperatures (-40-105 degrees Celsius) in the future.
This article is selected from the "Intelligent Hardware Special Issue" in April. More high-end interviews can be downloaded from the special issue page ! 
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