Nordic Semiconductor Announces the New nRF5340 Microcontroller

I have spent a lot of time with the Nordic Semiconductor nRF-series of micro-controllers, especially the nRF8001. That chip was the first easily accessible platform back at the beginning of the Bluetooth LE era, and turned out to be one of the first to have a solid open source toolchain built around it.

More recently we’ve seen the newer Nordic nRF52840, probably the closest competitor on the market to the Ambiq Micro Apollo 3 used in SparkFun’s Edge board and Artemis modules when it comes to power envelope, become one of the early platforms supported by TensorFlow Lite for Micro-controllers.

However today we see the release of a new chip from Nordic, the nRF5340.

The new Nordic nRF5340 is the world’s first wireless System-on-Chip (SoC) with two separate Arm Cortex-M33 processors. The first is an application processor, an Arm Cortex-M33 with FPU and DSP instructions, that can be clocked at either 64 or 128 MHz, with 1MB of Flash, and 512 kB of RAM. The second is a programmable network processor, an Arm Cortex-M33 clocked at 64 MHz with 3 kB of instruction cache, 256 kB of Flash, and 64 kB of RAM.

The SoC has a 2.4GHz multi-protocol radio with support for Bluetooth 5.1, Bluetooth LE, and Bluetooth Mesh networking. Also supported is NFC, along with both Zigbee and the Thread protocols. The radio is designed to be ultra-low-powered, drawing 3.2 mA in TX and 2.6 mA in RX.

The chip is designed for low power applications and the Internet of Things (IoT), and offers trusted execution, root-of-trust, and secure key storage. Also on chip is Arm TrustZone, and Arm's CryptoCell-312 providing hardware-accelerated cryptography and key management.

The chip is supported by the Zephyr Project, a scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) intended for IoT devices.

While most will want to wait until the chip is in more widespread distribution, and there are breakout boards—and some open source support, from the usual suspects like Adafruit, SparkFun, and perhaps also Arduino—today also sees the release of a Preview Development Kit (PDK) for the new chip from Nordic which can be programmed using the nRF Connect SDK.

Intended more for large companies intending to use the chip in lightning, wearables, or smart home devices, the PDK is an old style development board to manufacturers get a feel for how the chip performs—before committing to put the chip inside their own products. Although it is sort of interesting to see that the PDK has Arduino Uno header compatibility, a sign of just how far maker hardware has penetrated into the bigger electronic companies.

Nordic has said that the PDK will be replaced by a Development Kit (DK) when the nRF5340 SoC is “…closer to being production ready.” It’s not clear as the difference between the existing PDK, announced today along with the chip, and the final development kit.

Nordic’s recommended price for the nRF5340 PDK is $49, while the chip itself will cost $6 in low order quantities. There's no news today on availability, or a date when we can expect to see the chip ship in tape and reel quantities. So stay tuned for that.