Texas Instruments recently expanded its connectivity portfolio with a new family of wireless MCUs that enable high-quality Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) at half the price of competing devices. Featuring best-in-class standby current and radio-frequency (RF) performance, the SimpleLink™ Bluetooth LE CC2340 family is built on the foundation of TI’s decades of wireless connectivity expertise.

"The adoption of Bluetooth LE is accelerating and our embedded world demo of the CC2340 family will show you how to quickly and easily add the technology to any application," said Marian Kost, vice president and general manager of Connectivity at Texas Instruments. "The new MCUs will provide high-quality RF and power performance at an affordable price, backed by unrivaled technical support and internal manufacturing capacity investments that will help meet our customers’ demand for years to come."

The CC2340R2 and CC2340R5 wireless MCUs, offering flash memory of 256KB and 512KB respectively, provide exceptional flexibility for engineers and ample space for application code. Additionally, with the proliferation of Bluetooth LE applications, designers need additional memory capacity to easily update software remotely. The new wireless MCU family features 36KB of RAM with over-the-air download support.

The new MCUs include industry-leading standby current of less than 830 nA, which is 40 percent lower than competing devices. The reduction in standby current helps extend battery life for up to 10 years on a coin cell battery in wireless applications such as electronic shelf labels and tire pressure monitoring systems. The CC2340 family also features an operating temperature range of –40ºC to 125ºC to help ensure a stable connection across applications, from industrial sensors and medical laboratories to outdoor environments such as EV chargers or smart meters.

Engineers are also able to expand RF performance and connection range with an output power up to +8 dBm, the industry’s highest among competing Bluetooth LE wireless MCUs. In addition, the CC2340 devices feature an integrated RF balun to enable a simpler design with fewer external components, leading to cost savings.

Pricing for the CC2340 family will start as low as US$0.79 for 1,000-unit quantities. For more information, see www.ti.com/cc2340.