Bluetooth 5 SoC targets cost sensitive, mass-market wireless devices
The full production volume launch of the nRF52810 SoC is accompanied by the introduction of Nordic’s S112 SoftDevice (Nordic’s latest RF Bluetooth 5 (Bluetooth LE) protocol software or ‘stack’), and a new version of Nordic’s nRF5 Software Development Kit (SDK), a production-ready development tool with full peripheral driver support for the nRF52810 SoC.
The nRF52810 SoC has the lowest power consumption in the nRF52 Series and brings the 2 Mbps higher throughput, improved coexistence, and increased broadcast capacity with advertising extensions benefits of Bluetooth 5 to the most cost-sensitive, high-volume applications.
The nRF52810 SoC retains the 64 MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex M4 MCU of other nRF52 Series SoCs maintaining the performance demanded when employing functionality such as LE secure connections and 2 Mbps data processing. In addition, the nRF52810 SoC’s Flash-based software architecture brings over-the-air (OTA) application upgrades to products previously excluded by cost constraints.
Example target applications include network-connected sensors and beacon building blocks for the IoT, low-cost wearables, low-cost wireless mice and keyboards for computers and tablets, toys, disposable medical monitoring devices, and connectivity controllers as companions to much larger MCUs.
The S112 SoftDevice is an extensively-tested, optimized, lightweight stack designed to complement the nRF52810 SoC’s 196kB Flash/24kB RAM allocation. The S112 SoftDevice occupies just 100kB, ensuring ample spare memory for a wide range of mass-market Bluetooth LE applications and robust support for OTA application software upgrades.
To optimize the performance of the nRF52810 SoC, the S112 SoftDevice is a dual peripheral/broadcaster only stack but retains the Bluetooth 5/Bluetooth LE features of: 2 Mbps throughput; Privacy 1.2; LE secure connections; LE Ping; Long ATT MTU; Timeslot API enabling use with Bluetooth mesh or other proprietary protocols; and PA/LNA control function.
The key advantages of Bluetooth 5 compared with previous versions of the standard include: 2x the on-air data bandwidth (2 Mbps) compared with the Bluetooth LE implementation of Bluetooth 4.2; and 8x the broadcasting ability with advertising extensions that increase the advertising packet payload size to 251 bytes for more efficient data transfer, particularly in beacon applications.
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