The Latest in Bluetooth – Channel Sounding

Welcome to this edition of Wireless Wednesday. Each Wednesday NXP will bring you articles, videos, and blogs on key topics for wireless connectivity.

This week’s video shows the latest Bluetooth 6 innovation, channel sounding, in action. Channel sounding brings secure, accurate, and low latency distance measurement to Bluetooth connections. Using a standard Bluetooth connection, two devices can measure the distance between them through the new channel sounding procedure that was recently ratified by the Bluetooth SIG. This opens a wide range of exciting new ways to interact with IoT devices, from doors that automatically unlock to lights that turn on when you walk into a room. The innovations that will come from this new Bluetooth feature are just beginning to be imagined.

The video shows two different demonstrations of NXP’s channel sounding hardware and software. The first illustrates basic ranging with channel sounding, where two boards measure the distance between them. In the second, a more advanced setup shows how NXP’s one to many software allows four boards to use a single Bluetooth connection to greatly reduce the latency. The MCX W72 will be the first NXP IoT device to support channel sounding and will include the localization compute engine, a dedicated co-processor optimized for channel sounding algorithms.

For a better experience, download the block diagram.