Oslo, Norway. Nordic Semiconductor today announced that its nRF52840 Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) SoC—the high-end variant of Nordic’s nRF52 Series Bluetooth 5-certified SoCs—is now available in production volume. The nRF52840 accompanies the mid-range nRF52832 and baseline nRF52810 SoCs in Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 Series. With a wealth of features and peripherals the SoC offers the capabilities and flexibility to support a range of networked, connected products for wearables, gaming, VR/AR, and home- and industrial-IoT applications.
The high-end nRF52840 SoC, based on Nordic’s nRF52 Series architecture, is the first single-chip solution to bring all the benefits of Bluetooth 5 to the market, the company said. The key advantages of Bluetooth 5 compared with previous implementations of the Bluetooth LE specification include 2x on-air raw data bandwidth (2 Mb/s), 4x range, 8x broadcasting ability with advertising extensions that increase the advertising packet payload size to 251 bytes, and an improved channel coexistence algorithm.
In addition, the nRF52840 SoC offers concurrent Bluetooth 5 and Thread support. The capability is enabled by the SoC’s Bluetooth LE and Thread “Dynamic Multiprotocol” feature, which allows simultaneous support of the S140 SoftDevice and OpenThread RF protocol stack.
Engineers can commence developing designs with the nRF52840 SoC and S140 SoftDevice using the latest version of Nordic’s nRF5 SDK. The nRF5 SDK v15 is a production-ready development tool with full peripheral driver support for the nRF52840 SoC. In addition, the nRF5 SDK now incorporates the capabilities of the earlier nRF5 SDK for IoT including an IPv6 over Bluetooth LE adaptation layer (6LoWPAN) and a complete IP suite. The nRF5 SDK also includes SEGGER’s Embedded Studio, a complete all-in-one solution for managing, building, testing, and deploying embedded applications.
The nRF52840 SoC employs a 64-MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4F processor, which has ample generic processing, floating-point, and DSP performance to meet the demands of even the most challenging wireless applications.
The SoC features a new radio architecture with an 8-dBm on-chip PA; 1-MB flash, and 256-kB RAM; full support for Bluetooth 5, 802.15.4 (including Thread), ANT, and proprietary 2.4-GHz wireless technologies; a full speed USB 2.0 controller; and a host of peripherals (many with EasyDMA), including a quad-SPI interface. The nRF52840 can also operate from power supplies above 5 V, such as rechargeable-battery power sources.
The SoC also incorporates an Arm CryptoCell-310 cryptographic accelerator for best-in-class security for Cortex-M based SoCs. Extensive crypto ciphers and key generation and storage options are also available.
The S140 SoftDevice is a tested Bluetooth 5-certified software stack with full support for all the benefits of Bluetooth 5 in concurrent, multirole operation.
“The production launch of the nRF52840 SoC, S140 SoftDevice, and the nRF5 SDK bring the highest-performance multiprotocol low-power wireless production-ready solution in the world to the global market,” says John Leonard, a product marketing manager with Nordic Semiconductor. “This single-chip product is the first in the market with full range of support for Bluetooth 5 and Bluetooth mesh, and also brings Thread, 802.15.4, ANT, and 2.4-GHz proprietary to the most challenging wireless applications, including advanced wearables, virtual and augmented reality, high-performance HID controllers, smart-home and -industry, and IoT networks.”
For more, visit the nRF52840 product page.