Nordic Semiconductor-powered Bluetooth Low Energy Modules Ease Development of Bluetooth 5 Wireless Solutions in Ultra Compact mHealth and Wearables Applications

Nordic Semiconductor announces that Tokyo, Japan-based electronic component and wireless module manufacturer, Taiyo Yuden, has selected Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth® low energy System-on-Chip (SoC) for its EYSHSNZWZ Bluetooth low energy module. The EYSHSNZWZ is a Bluetooth 5 ready ultra low power module designed for a range of space-constrained applications including mHealth devices, wearables, and smartphone accessories.

Designed to help non-expert RF developers of complex wirelessly-connected Bluetooth 5-enabled products reduce time-to-market, the EYSHSNZWZ employs the 3 by 3.2mm wafer level-chip scale package (WL-CSP) variant of Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC, and includes an embedded high performance printed PCB antenna, resulting in an ultra compact 3.25 by 8.55 by 0.9mm form factor.

With a maximum output power of +4dBm and an operating temperature range of -40 to 85⁰ C, the EYSHSNZWZ offers 14 general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs), SPI, UART, I2C, I2S, PDM and 12bit ADC interfaces, and is also pre-certified to FCC, ISED, and MIC standards.

Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth low energy SoC, a member of Nordic’s sixth generation of ultra low power (ULP) wireless connectivity solutions enables the module to power even the most complex, processor-intensive wireless applications.

The SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit ARM® Cortex® M4F processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™ and proprietary 2.4GHz RF software) featuring -96dB RX sensitivity, with 512kB Flash memory, 64kB RAM, and an NFC™-A tag for “Touch-to-Pair” operations. When launched, the SoC was the world’s highest performance single-chip Bluetooth low energy solution, delivering up to 60 percent more generic processing power, offering 10 times the Floating Point performance, and twice the DSP performance compared to competing solutions.

The nRF52832 SoC has been engineered to minimize power consumption with features such as the 2.4GHz radio’s 5.5mA peak RX/TX currents and a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80 percent compared with Nordic’s nRF51 Series SoCs. The result is a Bluetooth low energy solution which offers 58 CoreMark/mA, up to twice as power efficient as competing devices.

“Taiyo Yuden now has 11 modules employing either Nordic’s nRF51 or nRF52 SoCs, and the common software architecture has allowed us to easily switch between the two,” says Mikio Aoki, Taiyo Yuden Project Manager. “In this instance, we selected the nRF52832 WL-CSP for its powerful and universal ARM Cortex M4F processor and the large Flash and RAM capacity, as well as the NFC-A tag for Touch-to-Pair applications.

“As a company, Nordic provides great quality development and control support and very fast response.”

The EYSHSNZWZ Bluetooth low energy module will be available in commercial quantities from May 2017.

For additional Nordic Semiconductor or Taiyo Yuden product information or technical support, contact Symmetry Electronics, an authorized distributor of industry leading wireless, audio/video and embedded chips, modules and dev/eval tools (877) 466-9722.