Cypress offering BLE chipset, Here's what you need to know

If you’ve been following the news recently you may have heard the Cypress Semiconductor has launched Bluetooth Low Energy capable devices supporting the Bluetooth v4.1 specification.With these devices, based on PSoC and PRoC architectures, Cypress joins a host of other companies already present in the space in hopes of capitalizing on the coming IoT bonanza.

Cypress realizes that the BLE space is getting congested and that “Cypress is not the first to marry a micro and Bluetooth. “We’re behind Nordic Semiconductor that’s been out there for eight quarters, and Texas Instruments has been out there a while… but the BLE market is not there yet anyway,” Cypress CEO T.J Rodgers told EE Times.

If you know most of the BLE solutions out there, they’re usually based on the Cortex-M0 processor along with a BLE radio. Cypress isn’t different in that respect. Both their devices offer 48-MHz ARM® Cortex™-M0 CPU, which is faster than the 16MHz typical of other solutions. But, PSoC BLE and PRoC BLE offer a few differentiating features that set them apart from others: