New Bluetooth SoCs for LE audio applications

Update: May 28, 2021

The Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340, a wireless SoC with Dual Arm Cortex-M33 processor for complex IoT applications is the third generation of dual-core Bluetooth 5.2 SoCs. This portfolio of products is available now at Rutronik UK.

As an evolution of the nRF51 and nRF52 series, the nRF53 series consolidates their key features, such as high-speed SPI, Bluetooth 5.2 and tolerance to working temperatures of up to 105C, with higher performance, greater memory and lower power consumption. This makes the chip particularly ideal for applications in LE audio, professional lighting, industrial, advanced wearables, medical, smart home, goods tracking and RTLS.

The nRF5340 is claimed to be the first wireless SoC with flexible Dual Arm Cortex-M33 processors. The processor offers a 1MB Flash and 512KB RAM. An FPU, as well as an 8KB two-way cache and DSP instruction functions, assure high performance of the chip.

The processors of the chip can be clocked to 64MHz or 128MHz utilising voltage and frequency scaling. With a setting of 128MHz, up to 514 CoreMarks can be obtained. Operation at 64MHz, on the other hand, promotes an efficient energy consumption of 73 CoreMarks/mA.

A high level of security is offered by the integrated Arm TrustZone, which differentiates between secure and non-secure regions on a single processor core to isolate the hardware system-wide for trusted software.