It’s a good think you did not drive down here for the ESC. It was in the Santa Clara Marriot ($4 parking for 30 minutes) and was nothing like it used to be. It was in a small ballroom, and no major players except ST. Nothing to see.
Except I met John Ford from ST who is the Avago rep. He’s good friends with an LSI lab manager I know well. He will get us all the samples we want. ST is working on a BLE SOC, either M0 or M3, and it is supposed to compete favorably with Nordic. (He mentioned TI’s BLE SOC having both an M0 and M3 on the same chip. Maybe worth looking into.) He said ST’s BLE is better than Nordic’s in terms of receive sensitvity and power consumption. He didn’t know about a Wakeup radio. He said that ST’s IMU can run circles around the Invensense, but the magnetometer in the 9-axis chip isn’t very good, so most people use the 6-axis plus a separate mag. He said that helps with chip placement too, since the mag is so sensitive to metal. Sounds bogus to me if the mag package size is anywhere close to the Invensense’s 3×3 mm. But we should look at performance. Also, since you have already developed the code for an ST IMU it would be good to save that effort, all other things being equal.
It was worth going to meet John Ford, but a bust aside from that. I only stayed 2 minutes after checking in.