Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth Development Kits

BLE Kit Portfolio Overview

Silicon Labs’ Bluetooth development kits are divided into three categories based on your development need, with kits for experimenting, prototyping, or developing  your production product, our portfolio has the right solution for you.

BLE Mobile App

EFR Connect, the Bluetooth Low Energy mobile app helps you to develop and test smooth smartphone connectivity and Over-the-Air (OTA) update capability for your applications. It works with all Silicon Labs Bluetooth development kits and you can download it for iOS and Android.

Which is the Right Kit for You?

Our kits, together with Simplicity Studio, provide a unified development environment that includes the SDK and industry-leading development tools. The kits are supported by GCC and IAR C-language compilers.

Explorer Kit

For experimenting, our entry-level kit gives you five powerful development features, including an onboard debugger, traffic analyzer, virtual COM port, mobile tester app, and connectors for MikroE and Qwiic peripheral boards. 

Dev Kit

To simplify prototyping or field trials, the dev kit supports both a coin cell and a connector for external batteries or power supplies. The Arm Cortex-M series based Dev Kits provide the key features needed in prototyping: 2.4 GHz chip antenna, board controller, J-Link debugger, packet tracing, virtual COM and various on-board sensors.

Pro Kit

When developing production products, you may need additional development features such as an Energy Profiler and a Network Analyzer to optimize your code and RF design. Additional features include an LCD display, Ethernet port, 8-channel logic, and a standardized interface for all Silicon Labs radio board products. 

Security and Bluetooth

When you want your products to withstand the most challenging cyber-security attacks, you can trust Silicon Labs' Bluetooth technology to safeguard your customers' privacy.

Silicon Labs Bluetooth Low Energy and Mesh stacks support all the standard features to protect your IoT applications against wireless threats.

When considering security in the context of IoT, there are multiple aspects a developer needs to consider.

Very few protocols are transmitted without some form of encryption in place. The alliances behind most of the leading standards-based protocols tend to make it mandatory and most proprietary protocols tend to implement protocol security using existing well-tested industry schemes.

In all cases, however, the encryption used by the protocol is only as strong as the security offered by the physical device itself. The easiest device attack is a remote attack on software to inject malware which is why a hardware root of trust secure boot is critical. Many IoT devices are easily acquired in the supply chain and allow “Hands-On”, or “Local” attacks which allows attacking the debug port or using physical attacks like side-channel analysis to recover secrets outside of communication encryption.

Silicon Labs offers a portfolio of device-level security options. To learn more click through to our security pages.