Nordic www.nordic.semi.com continues to push the envelope.
Integra Systems has used Nordic products on several projects. Nordic Semi is a great company and provides great support.
Wireless overtakes wired headphones
Bluetooth headphones outsold wired headphones for the first time ever in the first half of 2016 according to consumer research firm NPD Group.
Bluetooth 5 provides major advances in speed, security, and meshing capabilities.
See the following specifications of the Nordic 5 SOC.
Advanced multi-protocol SoC supporting
Bluetooth 5/ANT/ 802.15.4/ 2.4GHz
Proprietary
Active
The nRF52840 SoC is an advanced, highly flexible ultra-low power multiprotocol SoC ideally suited for ultra low-power
wireless applications. The nRF52840 SoC is built around a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4F CPU with 1MB flash and 256kB
RAM on chip. The embedded 2.4GHz transceiver supports Bluetooth® low energy (Bluetooth 5), 802.15.4, ANT and
proprietary 2.4GHz protocols. It is on air compatible with existing nRF52 Series, nRF51 Series, and nRF24 Series products from Nordic Semiconductor
Bluetooth 5
The nRF52840 has hardware support on-chip for Bluetooth 5. This includes long range and high throughput capability. It supports all Bluetooth low energy physical layer bit rates and modulation schemes.
Processing Power
The nRF52840 incorporates a powerful Cortex-M4F processor running at 64 MHz enabling the most demanding applications with complex arithmetic requirements to
be realized in a single chip solution. This CPU configuration supports DSP instructions, HW accelerated Floating Point Unit (FPU) calculations,single-cycle
multiply and accumulate, and hardware divide for energy-efficient processing complex operations.
Multiprotocol Radio
The 2.4GHz radio supports multiple protocols including Bluetooth low energy, ANT, 802.15.4 and 2.4GHz proprietary. It supports Bluetooth low energy 2Mbs and
1Mbs and Bluetooth 5 long range (500kbs and 125kbs). The radio supports high resolution RSSI measurement and automated functions to reduce
CPU load, including EasyDMA for direct memory access for packet data and assembly. Nordic provides protocol stacks for Bluetooth low energy. ANT protocol stacks are available from ANT.
Memory to Expand
The nRF52840 has extensive on-chip memory in both flash (1MB) and RAM (256kB) offering powerful possibilities for today’s advanced wireless applications.
Power Efficiency
The nRF52840 SoC employs power and resource management to maximize application energy efficiency and battery life. The supply range between 1.7V and 5.5V
supports primary and secondary cell battery technologies and direct USB supply without the need for external regulators. All peripherals have independent and
automated clock and power management to ensure they are powered down when not required for task operation to keep power consumption to a minimum without the
application having to implement and test complex power management schemes.The nRF52840 has a comprehensive system of automated and adaptive power
management features. These features are built into all aspects of device operation from power supply switching, to peripheral bus/EasyDMA memory
management and a automated shut down of all but the absolute essential peripherals required to perform a task.
ARM® TrustZone® Cryptocell-310
ARM Cryptocell-310 is a powerful on-chip cryptographic co-processor providing cryptographic functions and services to speed
up operations significantly, save CPU processing time and reduce energy consumption. It incorporates a true random number generator (TRNG) and support for a wide range of asymmetric, symmetric and hashing cryptographic services for secure applications.
On-chip NFC tag
NFC™-A tag support is included on chip. NFC Type 2 and Type 4 tag emulation protocol stacks are provided by Nordic opening up a range of new applications,
like NFC payment, and improved user experience for existing BLE applications with Out-of-Band (OOB) pairing. OOB pairing using NFC simplifies the process of
authenticated pairing between two Bluetooth devices by exchanging authentication information over an NFC link.
USB 2.0
The nRF52840 has on-chip USB 2.0 (Full speed) support and on-chip VBUS regulation allowing for direct connection to USB hosts for data transfer and direct USB
power for hosted applications.
Package Options
The nRF52840 is available in 7x7mm 73pin AQFN package with 48 available GPIO.
SoftDevice
The Nordic protocol stacks are known as SoftDevices. The nRF52840 is supported by the S140 SoftDevice. The S140 SoftDevice is a Bluetooth 5 pre-qualified
Bluetooth low energy protocol stack.