SoC targets LE Audio applications

The Nordic portfolio is available at Rutronik UK.

As an evolution of the nRF51 and nRF52 series, the nRF53 series combines their key features, such as high-speed SPI, Bluetooth 5.2 and tolerance to operating temperatures of up to 105°C, with higher performance, larger memory and lower power consumption.

This makes the chip especially suitable for applications in LE audio, professional lighting, industrial, advanced wearables, medical, smart home, goods tracking and RTLS.

The nRF5340 is claimed to be the first wireless SoC with flexible Dual Arm Cortex-M33 processors.

The processor features a 1MB Flash and a 512KB RAM memory.

A floating-point unit (FPU), as well as an 8KB 2-way cache and DSP instruction functions, ensure high performance of the chip. 

The processors of the nRF5340 chip can be clocked to either 64MHz or 128MHz using voltage and frequency scaling.

With a setting of 128MHz, up to 514 CoreMarks can be achieved. Operation at 64MHz, on the other hand, enables an efficient energy consumption of 73 CoreMarks/mA. 

A high level of security is provided by the integrated Arm TrustZone®, which differentiates between secure and non-secure regions on a single processor core to isolate the hardware system-wide for trusted software. 

LE Audio technology is the next generation of audio transmission using Bluetooth and represents an important future market within the IoT sector with high growth potential. In this context, LE Audio works with Bluetooth Low Energy transmission technology. The nRF5340 SoC has been specifically designed to meet all the requirements of this LE Audio technology. Audio streaming and improved and more efficient audio transmission are just two of the numerous advantages of this new technology