Bosch Sensortec
BME680
Integrated Environmental Unit
General description
BME680 is an integrated environmental sensor develo-
ped specifically for mobile applications and wearables
where size and low power consumption are key requi-
rements. Expanding Bosch Sensortec’s existing family
of environmental sensors, the BME680 integrates for
the first time individual high linearity and high accuracy
sensors for gas, pressure, humidity and temperature.
It consists of an 8-pin metal-lid 3.0 x 3.0 x 0.95 mm
3
LGA package which is designed for optimized consump-
tion depending on the specific operating mode, long
term stability and high EMC robustness.
The gas sensor within the BME680 can detect a broad
range of gases to measure indoor air quality for personal
well being.
Gases that can be detected by the BME680 include
Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) from paints (such
as formaldehyde), lacquers, paint strippers, cleaning
supplies, furnishings, office equipment, glues, adhesives
and alcohol.
The humidity sensor features a best-in-class response
time supporting performance requirements for emerging
applications such as context awareness, and high
accuracy over a wide temperature range.
The pressure sensor is an absolute barometric pres-
sure sensor featuring exceptionally high accuracy and
resolution at very low noise.
The integrated temperature sensor has been optimized
for very low noise and high resolution. It is primarily
used for temperature compensation of the gas, pressure
and humidity sensors, and can also be used for estima-
ting ambient temperature.
The BME680 supports a full suite of operating modes
which provides huge flexibility optimizing the device for
power consumption, resolution and filter performance.
Applications and Use Cases
f Indoor air quality measurement
f Personalized weather station
f Context awareness, e.g. skin moisture detection,
room change detection
f Health monitoring / well-being
‒ Warning regarding dehydration or heat stroke
‒ Measurement of lung volume and air flow
f Home automation control (e.g. HVAC)
f GPS enhancement (e.g. time-to-first-fix improvement,
dead reckoning, slope detection)
f Indoor navigation (change of floor detection, elevator
detection)
f Altitude tracking and calories expenditure for sports
activities
Emerging applications such as home automation,
indoor navigation, personalized weather stations and
innovative sport and fitness tools require a gas sensor
with quick response time, a pressure sensor with high
relative accuracy and a low TCO, in combination with
fast response, high accuracy, relative humidity and
ambient temperature measurements. The BME680 is
ideally suited for such barometer applications as the
device features excellent relative accuracy of ±0.12 hPa
(equivalent to ±1 m difference in altitude) and an offset
temperature coefficient (TCO) of only 1.5 Pa/K (equiva-
lent to 12.6cm/K).
Sensor operation
The BME680 supports I2C and SPI (3-wire/4-wire)
digital, serial interfaces.
The sensor can be operated in three power modes:
Sleep mode, normal mode and forced mode.
In normal mode, the sensor automatically cycles bet-
ween a measurement and a standby period. This mode
is recommended when using BME680’s built-in IIR filter
when short-term disturbances (e.g. blowing into the
sensor) need to be filtered.
In forced mode, the sensor performs a single measure-
ment on request and returns to sleep mode afterwards.
This mode is recommended for applications which re-
quire low sampling rate or host-based synchronization.
In order to tailor data rate, noise, response time and
current consumption to the needs of the user, a variety
of oversampling modes, filter modes and data rates can
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