Bluetooth 5.0 low energy RF and IEEE 802.15.4 and BLE combo IoT module

On booth b5 564, Panasonic Industry Europe used electronica to showcase its new highly-integrated wireless communications modules that are designed to offer excellent performance at low power.

Panasonic’s PAN1762 Series RF Module is a Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy RF Module based on the Toshiba TC35680 single-chip controller. The new Bluetooth 5.0 features enable a higher symbol rate of 2 Mbps using the high-speed 2M PHY or a significantly longer range using the LE coded PHY at 500 kb/s or 125 kb/s.

The channel selection algorithm improves the performance in environments which are busy at 2.4 GHz. Furthermore, the new LE advertising extensions allow for much larger amounts of data to be broadcast in connectionless scenarios and are therefore, favourable for beacon and mesh applications

Pascal Meier, Product Manager at Panasonic comments: “A high output power of up to 8 dBm and industry leading sensitivity (-105 dBm) of the TC35680 in combination with the LE coded PHY make the module very attractive in applications, where a long range is required. In addition, the ultra-low current consumption of the new PAN1762 Series makes this RF Module an ideal choice for battery powered devices and is Bluetooth Mesh SIG v1.0 ready. ”

Additionally, various sleep modes can be used to minimise power consumption and prolong Battery life time. To provide maximum flexibility, the new PAN1762 Series RF Module can be operated in hosted as well as stand-alone mode. With the build-in 128 kB flash memory where the Bluetooth Stack is located in the ROM, the new PAN1762 Series RF Module can easily be used in many applications, thereby eliminating the need for an external processor, saving complexity, space, and cost. FCC, IC, and CE approval are in preparation.

Panasonic’s PAN4620 dual-mode IoT module comprises NXP’s 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 Kinetis KW41Z SoC and a Bluetooth Low Energy wireless radio microcontroller based on an ARM® Cortex-M0+ core. The module can be operated in standalone and hosted mode. With 512 kB flash memory and 128 kB SRAM, the PAN4620 can be used as a standalone controller in very small and low power applications eliminating the need for an external processor, saving complexity, space and cost. The integration of 802.15.4 and/or BLE connectivity into existing applications can also be achieved when using the PAN4620 in hosted mode.

Using the PAN4620 with a TX power consumption of 6.8 mA and an RX power consumption of 6.1 mA in combination with NXP’s certified Thread or ZigBee stack, BLE stack or a combination of both for concurrent operation enables designers to deliver IoT application requirements without the need for a gateway.

A range of evaluation kits are available for all wireless modules.