World's smallest MEMS accelerometers offer big performance

Mouser now stocks the new BMA530 and BMA580 accelerometers from Bosch. The devices are the world's smallest acceleration sensors for space-constrained applications like wearables and hearables.

The accelerometers offer great performance in the industry's smallest package for design engineers who need easy implementation without detailed application knowledge. Built-in features enable the BMA530 to track motion activities with a step counter especially suited to wearables. At the same time, the BMA580 targets hearables with voice activity detection that features bone conduction. Typically, microphones consume much power in hearables because they need to be 'always-on' to listen for voice activity, but bone conduction detects the vibration of the user's voice to wake the device from sleep for increased power savings in miniature sensor size.

Compared to the company's previous generation accelerometers, the devices have a 76% smaller footprint (down from 0.95mm to 0.55mm) in an innovative WLCSP. This makes them easy to place on a PCB and integrate into portable products while offering a flexible set of connectivity options, including an I3C interface.

These accelerometers are supported by the BMA530 and BMA580 shuttle boards, available from Mouser. The shuttle boards, when used in conjunction with the Bosch Application board which is available to order, provide an example application circuit, enabling rapid prototyping when incorporated into existing designs.