Microwave Journal
www.microwavejournal.com/articles/30445-dialog-semiconductor-adds-bluetooth-mesh-support-to-smartbond-family

Dialog Semiconductor Adds Bluetooth® Mesh Support to SmartBond™ Family

May 31, 2018

Dialog Semiconductor plc announced that it is adding Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG)-compliant mesh support to its popular SmartBond™ Bluetooth low energy system on chip (SoC) family of devices.

Dialog is rolling out mesh support for the latest SmartBond™ products, starting with the DA14682 and DA14683, and then closely followed by the DA14586 and the DA14585, including its high-temperature derivatives. All of these devices are Bluetooth 5-qualified, enabling efficient best-in-class mesh implementation. 

The recently-adopted Bluetooth mesh specification has exciting implications for both device manufacturers and consumers alike, turning Bluetooth devices into powerful nodes of an interlinked network that can span greater distances, addressing longstanding challenges that Bluetooth standards have faced. This guarantees consumer interoperability between devices from different manufacturers, ensuring a smooth user experience and allowing ease of control from your smartphone, tablet or voice-controlled smart speaker device.

With mesh networking support, Bluetooth low energy is an ideal solution for implementing mesh networks in consumer applications such as smart home, smart lighting and beacons, in addition to commercial applications such as industrial automation, asset tracking, energy management and smart cities.

“Bluetooth 5 and mesh functionality are opening the door to a whole new host of powerful applications across the consumer and industrial space where range or coverage are factors that no longer need to be taken into consideration,” said Sean McGrath, senior vice president and general manager, Connectivity Business Group, Dialog Semiconductor. “Our SmartBond SoCs will offer these primary benefits of mesh, in addition to the low power capabilities and support that our customers know to expect from Dialog.”

To reduce customer development time, Dialog offers a qualified and tested mesh evaluation system, which can run on any of its supported SmartBond device hardware development kits. The DA14683 USB development kit, for example, is a small form factor, single board development kit with an on-board debugger, including themikroBUS™ interface, enabling easy connections to a multitude of sensor shields. In addition to this full set of development tools, Dialog also provides an iOS and Android application to allow their customers to provision, configure and control Bluetooth mesh nodes from their smartphone or tablet.