Alif Semiconductor announced the Balletto Bluetooth MCU family in 2024. Balletto devices are the world’s first BLE and Matter wireless MCUs to feature neural co- processors for AI/ML workloads. Now, Alif has announced the availability of its development kit, the DK-B1, to enable rapid prototyping of customer products that require ultra- low power Bluetooth Low Energy or 802.15.4 wireless connectivity. The MCU features a DSP engine and an NPU for efficient hardware acceleration of AI/ML workloads.
The Balletto B1 combines a powerful 160MHz 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.
Balletto MCUs give designers 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.