Suitable for IoT, wearables, toys, disposable medical monitoring devices, etc.

Nordic Semiconductor announced that it has started mass production of the 'nRF52810 Bluetooth LE (Bluetooth Low Energy) SoC (System-on-Chip) , ' which optimizes memory for a high-performance Bluetooth 5 certified SoC.

The nRF52810 completes the portfolio of Nordic Semiconductor's nRF52 series, along with the already proven nRF52832 (pin-compatible with nRF52810) and the high-spec nRF52840 SoC.

The mass production launch of the nRF52810 SoC comes with Nordic’s S112 SoftDevice (Nordic’s latest RF Bluetooth 5 (Bluetooth LE) protocol software or stack) and a new version of the Nordic nRF5 SDK (Software Development Kit), and production-ready development tools with complete peripheral drivers are also supported for the nRF52810 SoC.

The nRF52810 SoC consumes the lowest power in the nRF52 series and provides the fastest transmission speed of Bluetooth 5 at 2 Mbps, improved coexistence, and enhanced broadcast throughput through advertising extensions to the most cost-sensitive mass production applications.

In addition, the nRF52810 SoC, like other nRF52 series SoCs, is equipped with a 64MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex M4 MCU, which can provide the performance required to implement functions such as LE secure connections and 2Mbps data processing. In addition, the flash-based software architecture of the nRF52810 SoC enables support for Over-the-Air (OTA) application upgrades even in products where implementation was previously difficult due to cost issues.

Key target applications include network-connected sensors and beacon building blocks for IoT and low-cost wearable devices, as well as low-cost wireless mice and keyboards for computers and tablets, toys, and disposable medical monitoring devices, and can also be used as a connectivity controller with much larger MCUs.

The S112 SoftDevice is an optimized lightweight stack designed to fit the 196kB flash and 24kB RAM allocation of the nRF52810 SoC, and has undergone extensive testing. Since the S112 SoftDevice is only 100kB, it can provide sufficient free memory for various mass-production Bluetooth LE applications and reliably supports OTA application software upgrades.

In addition, S112 SoftDevice is a dedicated stack for dual peripherals and broadcasters, but to optimize the performance of the nRF52810 SoC, it supports Bluetooth 5 and Bluetooth LE features such as a 2Mbps transmission speed, Privacy 1.2, LE secure connection, LE Ping, Long ATT MTU, and a Timeslot API and PA/LNA control function that can be used with Bluetooth Mesh or other proprietary protocols.

John Leonard, Product Marketing Manager at Nordic Semiconductor, stated, “The nRF52810 SoC and S112 SoftDevice complement the other nRF52 series products and are notable products that enable Bluetooth 5 wireless connectivity in any product, no matter how simple the application.”

John Leonard also stated, “By simultaneously supplying a production-grade SDK, a new and diverse group of developers has been able to design even the simplest applications with previously impossible features and wireless performance,” and noted, “Prior to the nRF52810, these developers were limited to developing for non-Bluetooth 5 devices with very limited flash and small ROM capacity, resulting in constraints on application complexity, reduced transmission speed and coexistence performance, and limitations on OTA application upgrades that improve security and user convenience.”