Following the release in February this year of their TC35667FTG low power consumption Bluetooth chip, Toshiba Europe have announced a starter kit which should be useful for developers of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) applications. The kit consists of a motherboard housing a 20 MHz Toshiba TMPM395FWAXBG (ARM Cortex M3 core) microcontroller with 128 KB of ROM and 8 KB of RAM supporting low power operation at 1.8 V. The main board also includes temperature and acceleration sensors, GPIOs, JTAG and USB interfaces.

The TC35667FTG Bluetooth chip is mounted on a daughter board which also contains 512 kB EEPROM, a 26 MHz and a 32.7 kHz oscillator, a PCB antenna and a connector to allow for RF test equipment hook up. This chip features low-power circuit design and integrates an efficient DC-DC converter which helps to keep peak supply current below 6 mA and sleep current below 100 nA. The receiver has a sensitivity of ‑91dBm and the transmitter output power can be adjusted in 4 dB steps from 0 dBm to ‑20 dBm.

The JTAG connection allows software testing and debugging using the Integrated Development Environments from Kiel and IAR Systems. Also available are source code files of example applications and a high level API software driver.