nRF52820 SoC is introduced to support lower-end of nRF52 series
The nRF52820 Bluetooth 5.2 SoC is the sixth addition to Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 Series. It is a low power Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE), Bluetooth mesh, Thread, Zigbee, and 2.4GHz proprietary wireless connectivity device for smart home, commercial and industrial applications.
The nRF52820’s is capable of all the features of Bluetooth 5, 5.1 and 5.2 including long range and high-throughput of 2Mbits per second, as well as direction finding, low energy power control and low energy isochronous channels.
It has a full speed (12Mbits per second) USB 2.0 interface. The USB connectivity interface enables low-latency and high-bandwidth communication with a range of host devices, such as PCs, smartphones, and gateways. The connectivity also makes device firmware updates (DFU)-over-USB practical. In addition to the main supply regulators, the USB peripheral in the nRF52820 includes a dedicated regulator for converting the 5V Vbus signal to the 3.3V needed for the USB signalling interface, which negates the need for an external regulator, saving both cost and space.
Based on a 64MHz 32bit Arm Cortex-M4 processor, the SoC includes 256kbyte Flash and 32kbyte RAM. This, says Nordic, makes it particularly well-suited as a single-chip option for commercial and industrial wireless applications including professional lighting, asset tracking, high intensity discharge lighting and gaming products.
When paired with an application microcontroller, the nRF52820’s multi-protocol radio and +8dBm output power enables its use as a network processor for gateways and other smart home applications that require advanced wireless connectivity.
The nRF52820 is qualified for operation across an extended industrial temperature range of -40 to 105 degrees C.
The nRF52820 includes up to 18 general purpose I/Os and a range of analogue and digital interfaces such an analogue comparator, SPI, UART, TWI, and QDEC.
The supply voltage covers a 1.7 to 5.5V input range, allowing the nRF52820 to be powered by coin-cells and rechargeable batteries.
The nRF52820 is supported by the S112 and S140 SoftDevices (Bluetooth 5.1-qualified protocol stacks), and the S122 (alpha version) SoftDevice. The S112 and S122 are memory-optimised peripheral and central stacks respectively, while the S140 is a feature-complete Bluetooth 5 protocol stack for central and peripheral, including long range and high-throughput.
Nordic also offers the nRF5 software development kit (SDK) v16.0.0, with the full nRF5 SDK support to follow in Q2 2020. The nRF52833 development kit can be used to emulate the nRF52820 and as a basis to start nRF52820-based designs.
