[Tech Watch] Advanced Bluetooth 5, Thread and Zigbee multiprotocol SoC for robotics

Industrial robotics are a key component of Industry 4.0. Whilst robotics have long been an element in high-value product manufacture such as automobiles, the cost of automated production is falling and becoming more accessible to a wider range of industries.

All robotics are equipment with arrays of sensors and actuators and connectivity is vital for human interfacing, robot to robot communication and for diagnostics purposes. there are also situations where it is attrative and feasible to replace complex, costly wiring looms with a connectivity technology such as Bluetooth Low energy.

Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 Series are powerful, highly capable connectivity SoCs with extensive peripheral sets and I/O that are ideal for many robotic use-cases.

Its nRF52840 SoC is the most advanced member of the nRF52 Series SoC family. It meets the challenges of sophisticated applications that need protocol concurrency and a rich and varied set of peripherals and features. It offers generous memory availability for both Flash and RAM, which are prerequisites for such demanding applications.

The nRF52840 is fully multiprotocol capable with full protocol concurrency. It has protocol support for Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, Zigbee, 802.15.4, ANT and 2.4 GHz proprietary stacks.

The nRF52840 is built around the 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4 CPU with floating point unit running at 64 MHz. It has NFC-A Tag for use in simplified pairing and payment solutions. The ARM TrustZone® CryptoCell cryptographic unit is included on-chip and brings an extensive range of cryptographic options that execute highly efficiently independent of the CPU.

It has numerous digital peripherals and interfaces such as high speed SPI and QSPI for interfacing to external flash and displays, PDM and I2S for digital microphones and audio, and a full speed USB device for data transfer and power supply for battery recharging.

Exceptionally low energy consumption is achieved using a sophisticated on-chip adaptive power management system.

For details, click https://www.nordicsemi.com/-/media/Software-and-other-downloads/Product-Briefs/old-versions/nRF52840PBv20.pdf?la=en&hash=516968A8D06D7F41C8B14B6639DD9E14099E2853.