Energy-Harvesting Bluetooth SIP Links to Secure MCU

July 11, 2022

onsemi's Steven Dean shows off the RSL15 secure Bluetooth microcontroller with the RSL10 SIP Bluetooth module run with harvested power.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

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In this video, onsemi's Steven Dean highlights very-low-power Bluetooth solutions, including the RSL15 that only uses 40 nA in sleep mode and the tiny RSL10 SIP (Fig. 1).

1. The Arm Cortex-M33-based RSL15 (left) can manage up to 10 simultaneous Bluetooth connections. The RSL10 SIP (right) uses a Cortex-M3 and comes in a tiny 6- x 8-mm package.

The demo takes advantage of the RSL15-EVB evaluation kit that ties into a smartphone app. The RSL10 is used in an energy-harvesting board that can send switch status via Bluetooth without needing a battery.

The RSL15 is built around the latest Arm Cortex-M33 with TrustZone and secure-boot support (Fig. 2). The Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2 front-end is built-in and it works well with a low-cost PCB antenna.

2. The RSL15 Bluetooth microcontroller includes Arm TrustZone and secure-boot support.

The RSL10 SIP is based on a Cortex-M3 and targets very-low-power mHealth wearables, appliances, and switches as well as devices like smart locks.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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