OSLO, NORWAY. Nordic Semiconductor has announced availability of its nRF52840 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) system on chip. In addition to being Bluetooth 5-certified, the multi-protocol SoC supports Bluetooth mesh, Thread, 802.15.4, ANT, and 2.4GHz proprietary protocols. The chips are also outfitted with a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4F processor running at 64 MHz for general processing tasks, as well as an Arm CryptoCell-310 cryptographic accelerator.

The nRF52840 delivers the full benefits of Bluetooth 5, including 2 Mbps on-air raw data bandwidth, 4x range, 8x broadcasting capability with packet payloads of up to 251 bytes, and improved channel coexistence. It also supports concurrent Bluetooth 5 and Thread operation through a “Dynamic Multiprotocol” feature that enables simultaneous execution of Nordic’s S140 SoftDevice software stack and the OpenThread RF protocol stack.

The SoC is based on a radio architecture consisting of an on-chip +8 dBm power amplifier (PA), 1 MB Flash, 256 kB RAM, a full-speed USB 2.0 controller, and other peripherals such as a quad-SPI interface with EasyDMA. The chip can also operate from power supplies above 5V.

The nRF52840 release is accompanied by a new version of Nordic’s nRF5 software development kit (SDK), which includes full peripheral driver support for the SoC, an IPv6-over-Bluetooth LE adaptation layer (6LoWPAN), a complete Internet Protocol (IP) suite, and SEGGER’s Embedded Studio development software. A production-grade nRF5 SDK for Mesh tool is also available for Bluetooth mesh developers working with the nRF52840.

More information on the part can be found at www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840.

eletter-03-29-2018