Bestechnic BES2700YP Arm Cortex-M55 Bluetooth Audio SoC targets headphones, earbuds, portable speakers

Bestechnic BES2700YP is an Arm Cortex-M55 Bluetooth Audio SoC designed for Smart earbuds with adaptive ANC, Smart Bluetooth headphones/headsets, ANC hearing-aids, Bluetooth speakers, and other portable audio devices

When I wrote about the Ambiq Apollo330 Plus SoC family last week, I realized it was the first time I covered Arm Cortex-M55 microcontrollers with built-in wireless, in that case Bluetooth LE 5.4 and 802.15.4 (Thread/Matter) radios, and that’s how I came across the BES2700YP SoC with a more narrow use cases since it’s made for Smart Bluetooth audio applications.

BES Technic BES2700YP key features and specifications:

• CPU Subsystem – Arm Cortex-M55 core
• Sensor Hub Subsystem – Arm STAR-MC1 core (improved Arm Cortex-M33 core) with sensor engine, BECO NPU, and VAD (Voice Activity Detection)
• Memory – 4 MB SRAM shared across the CPU, Bluetooth, and Sensor Hub cores
• Storage – Flash in package, boot ROM
• Bluetooth Subsystem
  • Arm STAR-MC1 core (Arm Cortex-M33 core with some improvements)
  • Dual-mode Bluetooth 5.3 with LE audio
  • Bestechnic IBRT (Intelligent Bluetooth Retransmission) technology with Forward Error Correction (FEC), improving RF performance and reliability in TWS systems
• Audio – 2x DAC, 4x ADC
• Peripherals – GPADC, SPI, I2C, UART, I2S, TDM, SPDIF, DMIC, PWM, GPIO, etc…
• Security – PSA Certified Level 1
• Package – 144-pin BGA

The BES2700YP is not exactly new since it launched about 3 years ago, and is already found in products like the HUAWEI FreeBuds Pro 2 pictured above. Sadly, that does not mean the SDK is broadly available, and the two GitHub repositories with the BES2700 SDK I could find are either deleted or empty…  That’s because all development resources require an NDA, and that’s partially why the Core Time 2 smartwatch is based on a SiFli SF32LB52J Bluetooth SoC instead of one from Bestechnic.

Talking about smartwatches, the OnePlus Watch 2 is based on a BES2700 chip in combination with a Snapdragon W5. But that’s a different variant called the BES2700BP with a 2.5D GPU, MIPI DSI, and a HiFi4 audio DSP. To make things even more confusing, the BES2700H, BES2700IHC, BES2700iBP, and BES2700iMP variants only feature STAR-MC1 cores and no Cortex-M55 cores.

A more recent and powerful option is the BES2800BP with a dual-core Cortex-M55 CPU subsystem with a dual-core BECO NPU, dual-mode Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, a HiFi 4 DSP, a Host subsystem with sensor engine, 8.3MB SRAM, and a 2.5D GPU with a MIPI DSI display interface. The BES2800HP is similar but lacks GPU and display support. There’s still no public SDK, but somebody posted a datasheet for the BES2800BP.

The BES2700 and BES2800 Series offer some powerful Cortex-M55 wireless microcontrollers with Bluetooth 5.3/5.4 and optional WiFi 6, but considering Bestechnic requires an NDA, they are better suited to (high-volume) commercial products than open-source projects, although Pine64 tried once with PineBuds Pro ANC & TWS earbuds using a BES2300YP dual-core Arm Cortex-M4F Bluetooth SoC. More details about the BES2700 and BES2800 Cortex-M55 wireless SoCs may be found on the Bestechnic website.

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