Bluetooth 5 ready SoC - 31 January 2017 - RF Design

New from Nordic Semiconductor comes the Bluetooth 5 ready nRF52840 SoC with features and capabilities that target smart home and advanced wearables – including wearables for payments and medical – as well as industrial sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The nRF52840 is designed to support the latest Bluetooth wireless technology core specification, Bluetooth 5, that will shortly be officially adopted by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). Bluetooth 5 introduces longer range and throughput improvements that significantly enhance Bluetooth wireless technology’s suitability for smart home, wearables and IoT applications. Compliance with the specification, coupled with increased maximum output power (+8 dBm), enables the nRF52840 SoC to deliver Bluetooth low energy wireless connectivity with up to 4x the range or 2x the raw data bandwidth (2 Mbps) compared with the previous Bluetooth low energy implementation of Bluetooth 4.2.

In addition to Bluetooth 5 support, the chip includes IEEE 802.15.4 wireless technology capability. IEEE 802.15.4 forms the basis of smart home technologies such as ZigBee and Thread (with additional upper layers not defined by the standard). IEEE 802.15.4 can also be employed as a network adaptation layer with 6LoWPAN and standard Internet protocols.

The nRF52840 employs the proven 64 MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex M4F processor used on Nordic’s existing nRF52832 SoC, plus a CPU with ample generic processing power, floating point and DSP performance for even the most demanding wireless applications.

The nRF52840’s hardware enhancements compared with the nRF52832 include a new radio architecture with output power increased to a maximum of +8 dBm to boost the link budget to >110 dB; a doubling of Flash memory to 1 MB and quadrupling of RAM memory to 256 KB; support for Bluetooth 5, IEEE 802.15.4, ANT and proprietary 2,4 GHz wireless technologies; a full speed (12 Mbps) USB 2.0 controller; and a host of new peripherals (many with EasyDMA) including a quad SPI interface. This nRF52840 SoC can also operate from power supplies above 5 V such as rechargeable battery power sources.

Designed to address the inherent security challenges faced in IoT applications, the new SoC incorporates an ARM CryptoCell-310 co-processor offering best-in-class security for Cortex-M based SoCs. Nordic says extensive crypto ciphers and key generation and storage options are also available.

The introduction of the nRF52840 SoC will be accompanied by the release of the S140 SoftDevice, the company’s latest addition to its family of RF protocol software stacks. The S140 SoftDevice is a Bluetooth 5 compliant software stack with support for the long range and high throughput features of Bluetooth 5.

For more information contact Andrew Hutton, RF Design, +27 (0)21 555 8400, andrew@rfdesign.co.za, www.rfdesign.co.za