Why Nordic nRF52832 is so Popular for Bluetooth Solution Developer

As we all know, BLE SOC, as a new generation of Bluetooth, is now showing strong market competitiveness due to its low power consumption. The following will explain why many Bluetooth developer choose nRF52832 from five aspects: power consumption, radio frequency parameters, chip processing power, memory and support protocols.

1.      Power consumption

The power consumption of the nRF52832 chip is about 5.0mA, which can be clearly seen from the table: Compared with other models, the power consumption of the nRF52832 is lower.

2. RF parameters

Transmit power and receive sensitivity are RF parameters that every Bluetooth solution manufacturer is concerned about. Higher transmit power and receive sensitivity can be more advantageous in long-distance transmission applications.

3. Chip processing power

M4F is the addition of a floating-point operation unit to Cortex-M4, which can be used to meet more operation requirements, with higher performance and smaller size. HYXKIOT's BLE modules HY-KTB522 and HY-KTB523 use nRF52832 chip, It is widely used in wearable devices, smart home, light control etc..

While most first-generation chips use ARM Cortex cores, the Cortex-M0 core is a low-power core, which is suitable for collecting sensor data, but not very good at running algorithms. When you need to run the BLE protocol stack in the Cortex-M0 or 8051 core, it doesn't have much remaining performance to do other things, and some complex peripherals can't be connected.

4. RAM

Normally the chip will provide 128KB or 256KB of Flash capacity, and the real protocol stack is generally 70KB to 90KB in size, so there is not much space left for the application. BLE applications continue to develop, and more and more things need to be processed, so larger RAM and larger Flash are required.

nRF52832 has 512KB of Flash, which is the BLE SoC with the largest memory at present. Normally the RAM of the BLE SoC is only 16KB. After removing the 8KB to 12KB commonly used in the Bluetooth protocol stack, there is not much left, while the nRF52832 has the largest RAM of 64KB at present.

5. Multi-protocol support

The KW40Z released by Freescale is limited by processing power and Flash/RAM, it only supports BLE. TI's CC2650 supports BLE, Zigbee, 6LowPAN and RF4CE. Nordic's chip supports BLE and ANT as well as the 2.5Ghz free protocol. The wireless hardware provided by the chip is similar, the difference lies in the use of different software.

BLE is the most popular wireless connection protocol, and multi-protocol support definitely has a wider application space. But at the same time, the coexistence "coexist" should be considered, which means that when multiple protocols are applied at the same time, it is necessary to ensure that the wireless protocols cannot interfere with each other. Otherwise, a lot of power will be wasted on retransmitting data.

The following table shows the protocols supported by common BLE SoC chips: