Door operation and monitoring possible using smartphone

Nordic Semiconductor announces that its award-winning nRF52832 Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) has been featured in Samsung SDS’ latest ‘SHP-DP930’ Smart Doorlock.

Smart door locks are emerging as one of the key products widely used in the smart home market in Asia. China, in particular, is leading the market growth by investing more than $150 billion in the home automation sector.

The 'Push-Pull' smart door lock is Samsung SDS' latest smart door lock product for Asia and Oceania. This door lock is an integrated locking device that can be installed on any existing door, allowing users to easily enter their home or office without having to carry keys. In particular, the device adopts Bluetooth LE wireless connection powered by Nordic SoC, so it can be operated with smartphones with Bluetooth 4.0 or higher, and fingerprint, PIN, and RFID proximity card access options are provided. It also supports a mechanically reassignable emergency key.

Registered users, such as family members, guests, or housekeepers, can simply unlock the door by approaching it and touching the door button on Samsung SDS' iOS or Android-based app. In addition, the 'sHome Doorlock' app allows owners to check the entry and exit history of their home or office, and receive push notifications about battery replacement and access. For example, parents can check whether their children have returned home safely after school even if they are at work.

Nordic’s nRF52832 multiprotocol Bluetooth LE SoC integrates a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex™ M4F processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF software), with -96dB RX sensitivity, as well as 512kB Flash memory and 64kB RAM. The SoC delivers up to 60 percent more general-purpose processing power, including 10x the floating point performance and 2x the DSP performance compared to competing solutions.

Additionally, the SoC comes with the S132 SoftDevice for advanced Bluetooth LE applications. The S132 SoftDevice provides Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster, and Observer Bluetooth LE capabilities and supports up to 20 connection links and concurrent operation.

The SHP-DP930 smart door lock features a low-power nRF52832 SoC that allows standard operation for 12 months before replacement with eight AA batteries. The SoC has been designed to minimize power consumption, with peak RX/TX currents of just 5.5mA for the 2.4GHz radio and a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80% compared with Nordic’s existing nRF51 Series SoCs.

“Battery life is one of the most important considerations when selecting a wireless chip,” says Junho Moon, group leader of the business development group of Samsung SDS’s Home IoT team. “Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC has proven to be a solution that delivers the best performance per power consumption, while also providing the most up-to-date and stable RF protocol software.”

The nRF52832 SoC features a software architecture that separates application code and RF protocol software (stack), preventing the risk of stack corruption during application development and maintaining independence between the two stacks. It also supports secure Over-the-Air Device Firmware Updates (OTA-DFU) using secure signatures to ensure that updates to the device only come from verified and trusted sources. The SoC’s Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) provides strong protection, while the Arm processor and ample flash and RAM allow it to simultaneously manage the needs of AES and processor-intensive applications.

The nRF52832 SoC also supports Out-of-Band (OOB) pairing for additional security, simplifying the secure pairing process between two Bluetooth devices by exchanging authentication information over the NFC link.

“In addition to the hardware advantages of the Nordic SoC, we were able to utilize various software examples, which made development easy and stable,” said Group Leader Moon Jun-ho. “In particular, we were able to achieve very meaningful results through on-site technical support as well as Dvzone, a very active online development community.”

“Samsung is a trusted brand globally and Samsung SDS is building on its leading position in the smart home security segment with the launch of its new smart door lock,” says Geir Langeland, Nordic Semiconductor’s director of sales and marketing. “The SHP-DP930 smart door lock uniquely leverages the proven hardware of the nRF52832 SoC and the robust yet secure Bluetooth LE stack to make it an attractive solution for Asian consumers looking to implement smart home solutions.”