Breakthrough Low Power Combo Chip for Mobile Platforms and Accessories

Broadcom Corporation announced its latest and lowest power Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo chip for mobile platforms and accessories. The BCM43012 delivers up to 3X longer battery life compared to Broadcom’s previous combo chips, enabling OEMs to design a new wave of high-performance connected devices.

The BCM43012 allows OEMs to integrate Wi-Fi into platforms that have traditionally been powered by Bluetooth alone due to battery size or constrained power budgets. In some applications, the BCM43012 Wi-Fi consumes 80 percent less power than the most common Bluetooth solutions today. This significant reduction in Wi-Fi power consumption enables OEMs to leverage the increased throughput and range of Wi-Fi to deliver new use cases in a wide variety of devices. Using integrated Wi-Fi, accessories can also connect directly to the cloud without an intermediary smartphone.

“For more than a decade, Broadcom has achieved a market leadership position in connectivity combos by setting the standard for performance, features, and power consumption,” said Dino Bekis, Broadcom Vice President of Marketing, Wireless Connectivity Combos. “We have applied this expertise to launch a family of products for the promising mobile accessories markets with solutions that allow our customers to deliver a new generation of connected platforms with breakthrough capabilities.”

Key Features and Benefits
• Highly-integrated 28nm dual-band 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.2 SoC
• Integrated efficient power amplifiers (PAs), low noise amplifiers (LNAs), and power management unit (PMU) for low rest of bill of materials (RBOM) cost and small system footprint
• Architectural improvements provide unrivaled low power in sleep and active states for both Wi-Fi and BT
• Coexistence hardware and algorithms to ensure optimal Wi-Fi and BT performance
• WLAN features include enhanced proximity and location features enabled by 802.11mc and TurboQAM® data rates up to 96 Mbps
• Bluetooth features include angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD) technology, wireless charging support for A4WP and AirFuel, and early adopter 2 Mbps Low Energy protocol capability

Availability
The BCM43012 is now sampling with leading OEMs.