Bluetooth Stack and SDK#

This page provides an introduction to the Silicon Labs Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) stack and SDK.

About the Bluetooth Stack#

The v3.x Silicon Labs Bluetooth stack is an advanced Bluetooth 5-compliant protocol stack implementing the Bluetooth low energy standard. It supports multiple connections, concurrent central, peripheral, broadcaster, and observer roles. The v3.x Silicon Labs Bluetooth stack is meant for Silicon Labs EFR32 SoCs and modules.

The Silicon Labs Bluetooth stack provides multiple APIs for the developer to access the Bluetooth functionality. Three modes are supported:

1. Standalone mode, where both the Bluetooth stack and the application run in an EFR32SoC or module. The application can be developed with C programming language.

   

2. Network Co-Processor (NCP) mode, where the Bluetooth stack runs in an EFR32 and the application runs on a separate host MCU. For this use case, the Bluetooth stack can be configured into NCP mode where the API is exposed over a serial inter- face such as UART.

   

3. Radio Co-Processor (RCP) mode, where only the Link Layer of the Bluetooth stack runs on the EFR32, and the Host Layer of the stack, as well as the application, runs on a separate host MCU or PC. In this use case, the Host Layer is developed by a third party, since Silicon Labs’ Bluetooth stack is only built for EFR32 SoCs / modules. The Link Layer and the host layer communicate via HCI (Host-Controller Interface), which is a standard interface between the two layers. The HCI can be accessed via UART following the Bluetooth SIG's UART (H4) transport protocol or the Silicon Labs’ proprietary CPC (Co-Processor Communication) protocol.

   

Bluetooth Stack Features#

The features of the Silicon Labs Bluetooth stack are listed in the following tables.

Series 1