 is now time for your favorite segment IonMPI with Digikey. This week's IonMPI is from Jackson's Instruments. I like to mix it up a little bit. This week it's the MPIs from TI and what's interesting is that this is like this is like a meta MPI because I was researching this MPI and then as I was doing so I discovered other interesting MPIs so this is going to be like a journey I'm going to take you through. That's right. So this week the MPI is the TI CC 2652RB which is a wireless microcontroller 2.4 gigahertz wireless microcontroller. Let's look at the block diagram. So every chip company is now doing this thing where it's not enough to have microcontrollers like MSP430 and then separately you have some wireless chip that you or can chip that you connect up. Now everything is becoming very integrated. They're taking the the chip the microcontroller chip and other dyes for sub microcontrollers for wireless controllers. They're bonding them together and they're putting them in a package to make it super integrated and super small. So TI has been known for a really long time for their CC series of wireless chips and so the CC 2652 and they also have like a sister product which I'll talk about in a little bit the 1352. These are Cortex M4s. You can see there in the in the main chip is I'm just gonna get my stats right. It's a Cortex M4 48 megahertz 352k of flash 256k of ROM and I think that's where they put like the the soft device that's the software wireless stack. It's in ROM so you don't have to upload that every time. 8k of cache and 80k of RAM. So it's you know pretty capable Cortex M4. Got lots of sweet peripherals and the RB series the B at the end stands for BAW which is the it's a really interesting technology and it's basically a built-in high precision temperature compensated resonator looks like this it's like a piezoelectric resonator that's in the die and so you don't need an external crystal and there's always been internal resonators RC resonators inside of chips you know every Cortex I've seen has some basic 8 megahertz or 4 megahertz one that you can then PLL up but they're usually not that precise and they're definitely not precise enough to do wireless communications where you have to maintain that frequency and that frequency the RF frequencies generated from the resonator crystal but the BAWs are precise enough that they can do it so there's a short video. Yeah for this we're just going to play a few seconds. A few seconds but check the video on YouTube because it's actually was kind of cool I was like what is this BAW? So does it play clip? Yeah. At Texas Instruments we're making groundbreaking advances in bulk acoustic wave resonator technology. For decades designers have relied on timing devices with external high-frequency quartz-based VCXOs and or integrated LC-VCOs for meeting the timing requirements of high-speed applications but quartz-based solutions can be bulky and expensive. Okay so sweet so there's the 2652RB and what's neat is uh you know I actually have one why don't we go the overhead real fast and I'll show that there is no nice nice coin there. A little sneaky top seeker there. So here is the the main chip I might even zoom in a little bit and then so this is the 2652RB you can see there's an antenna here these this is the RC you know filter to take the differential output make it single mode so you can have an antenna but you'll see actually that there's usually a crystal here and they don't have it so there's no like 16 or 18 megahertz crystal that's normally there at 16 or 8 or 4 megahertz it's not here this I think might be a 32 kilohertz crystal but that's also optional for low power usage so you can basically you save on your bill of materials you know 20 30 cents and you don't need that space but you can still have RF chipset okay so let's go back to this one okay so while I was researching this though I found like the sister product which was like really fascinating to me this is the CC1352 which you can see here and what's interesting about this chip is it doesn't have the bulk acoustic wave resonator thing but it does have dual RF outputs it has both 2.4 gigahertz so of course it can do and like the 2652 you can do BLE you can do thread it can do ZigBee it can do you know any basically everything except Wi-Fi at the 2.4 gigahertz but it also has a as you can see at the top you know it has 2.35 to 2.5 megahertz but it also has from 287 megahertz up to 1.3 gigahertz like sub 1 gigahertz band so you can do 433 you can do 862 915 all of your favorite sub gigahertz frequencies you can do as well so you can do I know some people like to do ZigBee at sub gigahertz to get wider range so that's cool and there's also a CC1352 P and 2652 P and that includes a plus 20 dBm output power amplifier built into the die so you get like massive range with these chips and it's all integrated which I think is really neat it's they're all like basically pin compatible not exactly but you know because obviously if you have two RF outputs you're going to drop some GPIO but for the most part it's the same chip the same setup but you could have different frequencies different power outputs it's cool stuff it's all part of this family okay another thing that I saw while I was doing these it was really nifty is that there is the main CPU this Cortex-M4 there's the RF chip which is basically a Cortex-M0 and you communicate with that you know through the SimpleLink firmware there's also a sensor microcontroller which is a 16-bit mcu so it's like some msp4 30 something something and this is an ultra low power sensor coordinator chip and what you can do is you know one of the issues is that you want to wake up the whole chip right and then like enable some sensor give power to the sensor you have to wait until that sensor comes up takes a measurement and goes back to sleep so what the sensor coordinator can do is it can control the analog digital peripherals and like get measurements for you can even do like analog reads digital writes and reads and then delays like with the timer so that you can have this like micro micro computer start up get your sensor set up ready to read the data and then sometime later you can bring up the whole chip as a you know processor wake up and read all the sensor data in all at once and then shut down instantly so you can reduce your power usage there so there's a couple dev boards so the one I got is this one it comes with a debugger it's pretty expensive it's got USB by default it does you know BLE of course but then you can also try out some examples it does both central and peripheral in case you're wondering so it has a bunch of BLE examples that comes with the ccs compiler but then of course it also does multiple protocols and it can do them at the same time so you can have like a ZB to BLE bridge for example if you wanted based on this chipset I also really like the resource center for this chip because I was like you know I basically spent the weekend I learned how to use this chip and it had a really neat tutorial system like as you were learning how to install the IDE and you were going through the examples they had the little quizlets and stuff to teach you you know how does BLE work how does it be work it was pretty easy I installed it on Windows and I was basically compiling within 23 minutes okay and there's a little short video that they had we're going to play that and then we're going to tell you all about it yes we can get it so take it away at TI we understand the IoT landscape changes quickly and developers are constantly adapting the new simple link platform is here to help within a single software environment developers now have access to a broad scalable portfolio of microcontrollers that allow 100 application code portability how do we do this it starts with TI drivers a collection of completely portable easy to use functional APIs for the simple link MCU peripherals all built on a consistent hardware abstraction layer TIR TOS is then integrated into the software development kit or SDK industry standard POSIX APIs enable application code portability between various RTOS kernels along with connectivity options and wireless stacks let's say you want to design a new home thermostat with this common core software you can use an msp432 MCU to manage the interface and start delivering differentiated products quickly and it's easy to scale this design for new connected applications to add local Wi-Fi network control simply migrate your original code to the new cc3220 wireless MCU which comes preloaded with the needed Wi-Fi stack and you're done but what about commercial buildings or other industrial spaces once again you can easily port your application to the bluetooth 5 ready cc2640 r2f wireless MCU or the cc1350 device with an integrated long range sub one gigahertz transceiver for new functionality with one investment you have now created thermostats for the home a building and several industrial applications it's just that simple let us help you build the next generation of connected devices using the new simple link MCU platform one environment unlimited potential okay and where can you get this lady ate up you can get all these chips and the dev board everything else i uh mentioned over at digikey go to digikey.com and search for cc265 and you'll see the whole series or also the 20 sorry the cc1352 so there's a whole family of different chips again you know some of them have this acoustic wave oscillator and some of them don't some do sub gigahertz some don't but they're all as far as until 2.4 gigahertz ble thread zig b et cetera 802 54 um so cool stuff from ti and i'm i'm playing around with this and i might even show this off on uh upcoming desk lay data all right on mpi