Renesas SoC Targets Location Tracking

Renesas’s new DA14592 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) SoC fills in the gap between its high-end and low-end BLE offerings in power consumption, performance, and cost. Offered in a wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP) as small as 3.3 by 2.5 mm, it is Renesas’s smallest multicore BLE device and integrates a power-thrifty radio transceiver that uses more than 23% less power for send and receive compared to Renesas’s other BLE chips.

DA14592 features two Arm cores, a max CPU speed of 64 MHz, and is compliant with Bluetooth 5.2. With a hibernation current of just 90 nA and a radio transceiver that can transmit at 2.3 mA and receive at 1.2 mA, the DA14592 is aimed squarely at a host of IoT applications that demand extended battery life and frequent communication such as tracking tags and connected health devices.

In particular, Renesas is pushing the DA14592 for what the company refers to as “crowd-sourced locationing” —Bluetooth location tracking using Apple’s Find My network and a forthcoming similar network from Google. Products that utilize these networks take advantage of the vast installed bases of iPhones and Android phones to locate lost or stolen items. Here, the DA14592 faces a host of competition from existing BLE SoCs, including the Nordic Semiconductor SoC found in the Apple AirTag, which currently dominates the Bluetooth tracker market.

The DA14592 is in volume production now, targeted for worldwide regulatory certifications in the second quarter. It is priced at $2.28 per unit in 5,000-unit quantities.