Alif, which announced the Balletto™ Bluetooth MCU family in April, is now sampling 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
PLEASANTON, Calif., Nov. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Alif Semiconductor®, a leading global supplier of secure, connected, power efficient Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) microcontrollers (MCUs) and fusion processors, has released an evaluation board for its new Balletto product, the world’s first Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) wireless microcontroller to feature hardware optimization for AI/ML workloads.
The Balletto MCU 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.
Alif today announces the availability of the DK-B1 development kit for the Balletto™ B1, a wireless MCU series which 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.
Visitors to the Alif booth B4.106 at Electronica (Munich, Germany, 12-15 November 2024) can see demonstrations of the development kit for the Balletto B1 products.
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.”