There was much hype surrounding the official launch of Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF54 System-on-Chip (SoC) series at electronica 2024. IoT Insider Editor Caitlin Gittins took some time out at the show to speak with Sam Presley, Technical Product Manager, to learn what made the series so special.
The series represents Nordic’s concerted efforts in the ultra-low-power area of IoT, one that has been experiencing a lot of attention and innovation in recent years as one solution to the growth in battery-powered devices that require low power consumption to continue operating.
According to Presley, the launch of this series represents the company’s particular expertise in low-power Bluetooth, and taking it a step further.
“We saw that we had got as much as we possibly could out of the previous process node technology,” he explained, “so the nRF52 series was in a 55 nanometer process node, yet we had customers that needed more processing power, more memory and they still wanted even lower power consumption, so we decided to invest in moving to a 22 nanometer process mode, which is how we’ve been able to double the clock speed for processing power, memory and power consumption.”
The result was Nordic’s evolution from the nRF52 series to the nRF54 series.
“What we’re doing [at electronica] is comparing the improvement you can get from moving to the nRF52 series to the nRF54 … looking at the average power consumption, there are 165 micro amps on the nRF52 series, and that’s improved down to 75 micro amps on the nRF54.”
Other notable features of the nRF54 series include the high processing power, improved memory capacity and increased energy efficiency that Presley mentioned as focal points for their customers.
The range of applications for the nRF54 SoCs include consumer, like in keyboards and mice; medical for wearable patches; and industrial devices. Nordic had on their company booth some examples of where their ultra-low-power SoCs had been integrated, which was diverse, from keyboards to asset trackers like Apple Air Tags, and even a Warner Bros Harry Potter wand, which used a nRF52 series to recognise spell gestures and connect to smart home devices.
In some cases that Presley showed, their module partners integrate their SoCs so that their end customers can benefit from a faster time to market and reduce certification effort. “We have a wide range of modules, which shows our partners’ interest in the device and the preparedness for bringing their device to market.”
“You can see that different module partners choose to prioritise different things,” he continued. “For example, we have some modules that focus around size … whereas other module partners may choose to prioritise other things, like radio performance or costs.” The size of the module has been achieved through the chip itself shrinking.
The release of Bluetooth Channel Sounding as a feature in September 2024, to provide more secure and accurate distance measurement, was a technology that Nordic shared their support for in its nRF54 series.
“Channel Sounding is standardising a high accuracy distance measurement technology as part of the Bluetooth standard,” Presley explained. “We’ve been able to do distance measurement on our devices for quite some time, but with the standardisation it means that our devices, in things like an asset tracking tag, can accurately range with other devices such as mobile phones, which we expect to soon support Channel Sounding.”
Nordic will be entering into full volume production in 2025 for its nRF54 series, which includes the nRF54L15, nRF54L10 and nRF54L05.
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