Nordic Semiconductor nRF52xx Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz solutions are very often found in development kits and low power devices such as wearables, and it’s no surprise that the company introduced a new nRF52840 SoC supporting Bluetooth 5, the new standard promising twice the range, and four times the speed of BLE 4.x, as well as ANT, 802.15.4, 2.4GHz proprietary, and NFC connectivity.
Nordic Semi nRF52840 key features and specifications:
- MCU – 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 @ 64 MHz with with FPU
- Memory & Storage – 256 KB RAM, 1MB Flash
- Connectivity
- Bluetooth 5-ready multiprotocol radio
- Bluetooth 5 data rate support: 2 Mbps, 1 Mbps, 500 kbps, 125 kbps
- 104 dB link budget for Bluetooth low energy
- -96 dBm sensitivity for Bluetooth low energy
- Programmable output power from +8 dBm to -20 dBm
- NFC-A tag on chip
- Single-ended antenna output (on-chip balun)
- I/Os
- USB – Full-speed 12 Mbps USB controller
- SPI up to 32 MHz
- Quad SPI up to 32 MHz
- PPI — Programmable peripheral interface
- EasyDMA
- 12 bit/200 ksps ADC
- Security – ARM Cryptocell CC310 cryptographic accelerator, 128 bit AES/ECB/CCM/AAR coprocessor
- Power Supply – 1.7 V to 5.5 V; individual power management for all peripherals; regulated supply for external components up to 25 mA
nRF52840 is “on-air-compatible with nRF51, nRF24L and nRF24AP Series”, and target advanced wearables, IoT, and interactive entertainment devices (remote controls / controllers).
The company has also launched nRF52840 Preview Development Kit to get started with evaluation and development. The development board is hardware compatible with Arduino Uno Rev. 3 to allow the use of common Arduino shields, and also includes 4 LEDs and 4 buttons, all programmable by the user. It supports Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth low energy, ANT, 802.15.4 and 2.4GHz proprietary using the latest S140 SoftDevice software stack, as well as NFC thanks to an external antenna included in the kit. The kit is compatible with Nordic Software Development Toolchain using Keil, IAR and GCC, and can be programmed & debugging with Segger J-Link OB.
Samples and the development kit are available now at an undisclosed price. You’ll find more details about the nRF52840 Bluetooth 5 SoC and development kit on the product page.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Interesting, a couple of years ago Nordic wasn’t the least bit interested in ZigBee and now this…
I guess they’ve seen where the competition is head and decided that they wanted to stay competitive.
Let’s hope the pricing is competitive too, as this looks like a really nice solution.
@TLS
To be honest this probably has very little to do with Zigbee itself and more to do with supporting Nest’s Thread – Nordic clearly sees the smart home as a huge market and already has one of the best HomeKit implementations.
With the faster and more interoperable Bluetooth Mesh protocol coming next year it’s also a good “bridge” chip much like they do with BLE+ANT already.