Electronics Weekly
Equipped for Bluetooth 6 and 802.15.4, its embedded microcontroller is a 128MHz Arm Cortex-M33, backed by 1.5Mbyte of non-volatile Rram and 256kbyte of ram, and the module has a built-in antenna.
Scheduled for production in Jun, output will be 8dbm and it will be certified for CE RED, FCC, ISED and MIC, said the company.
Predicted reception sensitivity is -98dBm at 1Mbit/s or -106dBm at 125 kbit/s in long range (LE) mode.
Other interfaces are: 1x ‘high-speed’ SPI/UART, 4x SPI/UART/TWI, PDM (pulse density modulation, for microphones) , I2S, PWM, quadrature decoder and a 14bit ADC.
Security features include: a cryptographic accelerator with side-channel leakage protection, tamper detectors, secure boot, secure firmware update and secure storage.
There will be three versions: ‘Economy’ with the features above, ‘Standard’ which adds an on-board 32.768kHz crystal, and ‘Premium’ which gets the 32.768kHz crystal and adds 4Mbyte of flash.
To allow it to be hand soldered, visually-inspected and to be used with two-layer PCBs, edge castellations on the substrate carrying the module’s vital signals and some of its GPIO.
To get access to all 32 GPIOs that the Nordic chip offers, at the expense of mounting complexity, a 20pad land grid array is included beneath the module’s substrate.
“Its hybrid packaging of castellated holes and LGA combines the advantages of both worlds without compromising on size, and enables one of the best pin-to-size ratios for Bluetooth modules currently on the market,” claimed Panasonic.
Planned operating range is 1.7 to 3.6V and -40 to +85°C.
Possibly a block diagram of the planned Premium version – Electronics Weekly is checking
Development support includes an evaluation kit, PAN B511-1C EVB, through which “you can access all the different module interfaces and Segger J-Link on-board debugger”, said the company.
For software development, Panasonic suggests Nordic’s ‘nRF Connect’ software kit which includes Zephyr RTOS, code samples, application protocols, protocol stacks, libraries and hardware drivers.
Applications are envisaged in lighting, home appliances, industrial sensors, medical devices, healthcare wearables, energy management devices and on solar farms.
Samples are available, and a related part, PAN B511-1B, will be available for those needing to use an external antenna. (the ‘part numbers’ here are some form of branding – the actual part numbers for the -1C types begin ‘ENW89861A…’)
This preliminary mini data sheets is an early source of information for these Bluetooth modules
