April 27, 2024 
Professional magazine and portal dedicated to electronics 
Designers of wirelessly connected, coin cell-operated internet of things products can now reduce bill-of-materials costs by one-third while also saving space and battery life with the MAX32666 microcontroller from Maxim Integrated Products. This ultra-low-power dual Arm® Cortex®-M4 MCU with floating-point unit and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2 extends the device’s battery life by combining robust memory, security, communications, power management and processing functions traditionally performed by multiple MCUs into a single device.
As IoT applications become more advanced, more MCUs are typically added to the system. Usually these advanced systems include a dedicated processor to handle the application, another processor acting as a sensor hub, a separate standalone BLE microcontroller to handle the wireless connectivity function, and in many cases, a power management IC to efficiently provide supply voltages to the MCUs. However, this approach is proving to be unsustainable for IoT applications that are growing in complexity while still demanding smaller size and longer battery life (more info).
