Laird Connectivity has selected Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52840 Bluetooth 5/Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) multiprotocol system-on-chip (SoC) to power two products in its BL654 Series: the power-amplified BL654 PA module and the BL654 USB adaptor.
The BL654 PA module comes in a 22 x 10 x 2,2 mm form factor and enables OEMs to utilise Bluetooth 5 for secure, extended range in IoT product designs. The integrated nRF52840 SoC provides full Bluetooth 5 support including 2x on-air raw data bandwidth (2 Mbps); 4x range; 8x broadcasting ability with advertising extensions that increase the advertising packet payload size to 251 Bytes; and an improved channel coexistence algorithm compared with Bluetooth 4.2.
The SoC’s new radio architecture with on-chip PA provides -95 dBm receive sensitivity (at 1 Mbps in Bluetooth LE mode), a maximum output power of 8 dBm, and a total link budget of 103 dBm. In the Laird Connectivity module, the SoC’s sensitivity is boosted by the Skyworks PA/LNA to -98,5 dBm (at 1 Mbps in Bluetooth LE mode) with maximum output power of +18 dBm for a link budget of 116,5 dBm. The increase in link budget further boosts the module’s range.
The BL654 USB adaptor is a production packaged and fully certified version of Laird Connectivity’s standard BL654 module series. It comes in an 18,39 x 50,74 x 11 mm form factor with an integrated antenna and the ability to support applications directly developed with either Nordic’s nRF5 SDK or Zephyr, for true production rollouts of end-devices supporting a USB port.
The adaptor is a complete, embedded wireless solution with processing capability supported by the Nordic SoC’s 64 MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4F processor with a 2,4 GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT, Thread, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, and proprietary RF protocol software) with 1 MB Flash memory and 256 KB RAM. It concurrently supports Bluetooth 5, Thread and IEEE 802.15.4 protocols.
Both the BL654 PA module and BL654 USB adaptor are qualified over the full industrial –40ºC to 85ºC operating temperature range and are designed to serve various applications such as IoT devices and sensors, beacons and proximity applications, secure medical peripherals, industrial monitoring, and Bluetooth mesh. They provide development flexibility and enable OEMs to maintain stable, robust Bluetooth LE connections in harsh RF environments and use cases.
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