Hello, we are a group from the University of Texas at Austin and we are developing embedded systems and we wanted to use the Apollo 3 blue for prototyping and developing. We had an inquiry about the Appollo 3 Blue MCU and we wanted to know if the chip by itself was available?
Hello garzarobm.
Sadly we don’t carry the bare Apollo3 chips on the website and are not able to sell them direct. You’d need to get a hold of [Ambiq Micro directly at Sales_Americas@ambiqmicro.com to order the bare chips.](https://ambiqmicro.com/)
garzarobm, have you considered using the [Artemis module? It is designed precisely to make prototyping an implementation of the Apollo3 chip easier.
As you may know it is much more costly to design and manufacture a 4-layer PCB with blind vias - which will most likely be required to gain access to the 9x9 0.5 mm pitch Ball-Grid Array of the Apollo3.
On the Artemis module you can easily break out all 50 I/O and power pins on a standard 2-layer PCB. This is a big benefit IMO.
With the module you also get all the recommended decoupling capacitors for the chip as well as the passive components needed for the RF (Bluetooth) radio, as well as a Bluetooth antenna. And not to mention the module is FCC certified so you could save lots of time and $$$ if you ever needed to have your device certified.
All this comes in a module the size of my thumbnail. It is only about 2.5x the area of the bare chip.
I hope it is worth your consideration.](Artemis - SparkFun Electronics)
Hey liquid, just got a chance to see this, I’ll take a look into it, thanks!