General Description

The BMI120 is an inertial measurement unit (IMU) consisting of a state-of-the-art 3-axis, low-gaccelerometer and a low power 3-axis gyroscope. It has been designed for low power, highprecision 6-axis and 9-axis applications in mobile phones, tablets, wearable devices, remotecontrols, game controllers, head-mounted devices and toys. The BMI120 is available in acompact 14-pin 2.5 × 3.0 × 0.83 mm3 LGA package. When accelerometer and gyroscope are infull operation mode, power consumption is typically 925 µA, enabling always-on applications inbattery driven devices. The BMI120 offers a wide VDD voltage range from 1.71V to 3.6V and aVDDIO range from 1.2V to 3.6V, allowing the BMI120 to be powered at 1.8V for both VDD andVDDIO.Due to its built-in hardware synchronization of the inertial sensor data and its ability tosynchronize data of external devices such as geomagnetic sensors, BMI120 is ideally suited foraugmented reality, gaming and navigation applications, which require highly accurate sensordata fusion. The BMI120 provides high precision sensor data together with the accurate timingof the corresponding data. The timestamps have a resolution of only 39 µs.Further Bosch Sensortec sensors, e.g. geomagnetic (BMM150) can be connected as slave via asecondary I2C interface. In this configuration, the BMI120 controls the data acquisition of theexternal sensor and the synchronized data of all sensors is stored the register data and can beadditionally stored in the built-in FIFO.The integrated 1024 byte FIFO buffer supports low power applications and prevents data loss innon-real-time systems. The intelligent FIFO architecture allows dynamic reallocation of FIFOspace for accelerometer, gyroscope and external sensors, respectively. For typical 6-DoFapplications, this is sufficient for approx. 0.75 s of data capture. In a typical 9-DoF application –including the geomagnetic sensor – this is sufficient for approx. 0.5 s.Like its predecessors, the BMI120 features an on-chip interrupt engine enabling low-powermotion-based gesture recognition and context awareness. Examples of interrupts that can beissued in a power efficient manner are: any- or no-motion detection, tap or double tap sensing,orientation detection, free-fall or shock events. The BMI120 is Android 5.0 (Lollipop) compatible,and in the implementation of the Significant Motion and Step Detector interrupts, eachconsumes less than 20µA together.The smart built-in power management unit (PMU) can be configured, for example, to furtherlower the power consumption by automatically sending the gyroscope temporarily into fast startup mode and waking it up again by internally using the any-motion interrupt of theaccelerometer. By allowing longer sleep times of the host, the PMU contributes to significantfurther power saving on system level.