
Alif sampling BLE and Matter MCU with neural co-processor
Alif Semiconductor®, which announced the Balletto™ Bluetooth MCU family in April, has released an evaluation board designated DK-B1 for its latest Balletto B1 product, the first Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) wireless microcontroller to feature hardware optimization for AI/ML workloads.
The Balletto MCU features a DSP engine and an NPU for efficient hardware acceleration of AI/ML workloads. It gives manufacturers the opportunity to implement sophisticated AI/ML functions such as natural language speech recognition, AI noise cancellation, key word spotting, and audio beam forming in true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds, and sensor fusion ML models in wearable devices and other types of space-constrained devices.
The new DK-B1 development kit for the Balletto™ B1, a wireless MCU series which combines a powerful 160 MHz Arm® Cortex®-M55 CPU core with Helium™ vector processing extension for fast and power efficient signal processing, an Arm Ethos™-U55 NPU, a Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4 radio, and rich digital and analog capabilities in BGA or CSP package options.
Reza Kazerounian, President of Alif Semiconductor, said: “The announcement of availability of the Balletto wireless MCU family marks a notable milestone in the progress of the embedded world towards an AI-enhanced future. Balletto is the only wireless microcontroller platform which can provide meaningful AI capability with the small form factor and low-power operation required in endpoint devices. Now innovative embedded device designers can start discovering for themselves the astonishing AI capability and advanced MCU features in the Balletto MCUs.”
