IMUs have self-calibrating gyroscope
Three inertial measurement units (IMUs) in the BMI260 family are optimised for smartphone applications. The family comprises three sensors, BMI260, BMI261 and BMI263. Features include Android compliance, an I3CSM interface, and support for sensor synchronisation.
The IMUs are equipped with a high-performance accelerometer and provide accurate step counting, motion detection and precise data to support indoor simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM).
The BMI260 family offers significantly reduced power consumption for extended smartphone battery life, says Bosch. The low-latency, optical image stabilisation (OIS) and electronic image stabilisation (EIS) support enables sharper pictures and ultra-smooth video stabilisation.
The BMI260 is the base variant, combining Bosch Sensortec’s accelerometer with its automotive-proven gyroscope technology. It is robust against temperature fluctuations and PCB stress for precise acceleration sensing. The BMI261 variant is fully Android compliant and optimised for always-on smartphone gesture and activity recognition.
The BMI263 is Bosch Sensortec’s first product to be fully compliant with the latest MIPI I3CSM standard and supports both asynchronous and synchronous timing control. Each device includes a primary and secondary interface that can be configured independently in I2C or SPI. This enables dual SPI configuration, camera modules or auxiliary sensor connections, for example a magnetometer.
The entire BMI260 family enables extended support for data synchronisation.
Each of the three IMU devices includes the industry’s first motionless component retrimming (CRT) feature for built-in gyroscope self-calibration. This eliminates the need to calibrate the sensitivity of the MEMS gyroscope using a rotation stimulus.
Power consumption is kept low, with a full output data rate (ODR) of up to 6.4kHz, meaning the typical current draw for both the accelerometer and gyroscope is kept at a level of 700 microA.
The BMI260 IMU family provides an intelligent power management system enabling all always-on features to run inside the low power domain of the IMU. The host application processor has to wake up only on rare, dedicated occasions, to maximise the idle period for the main processor. For example, the system can run reliable gesture and activity recognition features at power draws of 30 microA.
The BMI260 family is in a compact package measuring only 2.5 x 3.0 x 0.8mm3. The IMUs are pin-to-pin compatible with its predecessor BMI160.
BMI260 and BMI261 are available for high-volume production. Samples of BMI263 are now available on request.
