Use a Ready-Made Kit to Rapidly Build and Deploy Secure, Multiprotocol IoT Devices

As much as Internet of Things (IoT) device development has evolved, device connectivity remains a persistent challenge. A decade ago, it was a challenge to design devices that early IoT adopters could connect to without a heroic effort. Today, IoT devices not only need to connect seamlessly right out of the box, but they also must ensure secure connectivity across heterogeneous networks while extending battery life. Shrinking delivery windows further complicate IoT design for developers working to respond quickly to competitive pressure. That’s why it has become essential to find a feature-rich development kit for low-power wireless system-on-chip (SoC) devices, backed by a comprehensive ecosystem. One such development kit from Nordic Semiconductor checks all the boxes.

Nordic’s nRF54L15 is a development kit based on the nRF54L15-DK evaluation board (Figure 1) that is designed to accelerate IoT designs using Nordic’s nRF54L series of wireless SoCs, including the nRF54L15. It can also emulate the nRF54L10 and nRF54L05 devices. Along with a full set of hardware design files, the kit includes a board that gives you a complete wireless development platform with Nordic’s nRF54L15 wireless SoC, 8 megabytes (Mbytes) of external flash memory, a power management IC, and 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) and near field communication (NFC) antennas.

Figure 1 : The nRF54L15-DK development board combines an nRF54L15 wireless SoC, flash memory, power management, and connectors to form a comprehensive hardware platform that supports rapid deployment of secure multiprotocol IoT devices. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor)

Along with a set of debug connectors and power-profiling headers, the board offers you several user interface components, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and buttons for manual interaction during software debug and execution. Three banks of connectors bring out the SoC’s general-purpose input/output (GPIO) ports, giving you full access to a wireless SoC that’s built for battery-powered IoT applications.

Built for low-power IoT applications

Nordic’s nRF54L wireless SoC family is a member of Nordic’s fourth-generation Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) SoCs. Nordic’s experience is evident in its compilation of a comprehensive set of features and capabilities that you’ll need in designs requiring multiprotocol connectivity and extended battery life. All nRF54L family members feature the same architecture, differing in the amounts of non-volatile memory (NVM) and random-access memory (RAM), with the nRF54L15 offering the largest, at 1.5 Mbytes and 256 kilobytes (Kbytes), respectively.

The architecture is built around a pair of processors (Figure 2), including an Arm Cortex-M33 main core and Nordic’s own RISC-V coprocessor. While the Arm Cortex-M33 processor handles application processing, the RISC-V core offloads time-critical tasks, providing low-latency processing for the architecture’s set of I/O, timers, and peripherals.

Figure 2 : The nRF54L wireless SoCs integrate an Arm Cortex-M33 and RISC-V coprocessor with a multiprotocol transceiver and an extensive set of peripherals. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor)

The nRF54L architecture addresses ongoing concerns for more secure IoT devices, featuring multiple key security enhancements, including Arm TrustZone, tamper mitigation, cryptographic acceleration, authenticated debug, secure key storage, and an immutable boot region that establishes the root of trust. In combination, these features give you the foundation necessary for secure over-the-air updates, secure boot, and the secure execution of trusted applications.

For wireless communications, the Arm Cortex-M33 processor handles the execution of multiprotocol wireless stacks. It works in combination with the integrated low-power multiprotocol 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) transceiver, which offers 8 decibels referenced to 1 milliwatt (dBm) transmit power and -96 dBm receive sensitivity.

The combination of stack availability and hardware capability gives you confidence that your design will support a wide range of leading connectivity technologies and IoT protocols, including Bluetooth 6.0, BLE, Zigbee, Thread, Matter, Amazon Sidewalk, and proprietary 2.4 GHz protocols at up to 4 megabits per second (Mbits/s). If your IoT device also needs to support Wi-Fi coexistence, the Arm Cortex-M33 processor will run the Wi-Fi stack for a Nordic nRF70 series Wi-Fi companion chip designed to connect easily to the Nordic nRF series SoCs, such as the nRF54L family.

The nRF54L wireless SoCs are fully qualified to BLE core 6.0, bringing features such as Bluetooth Channel Sounding. Channel Sounding promises a new level of accurate and secure distance measurement required for next-generation tags, smart locks, appliances, and asset tracking.

Software resources speed IoT software design

While the nRF54L15-DK development kit provides a ready-to-use hardware platform for developing nRF54L-based devices, the Nordic nRF Connect software development kit (SDK) (Figure 3) offers a comprehensive software foundation for rapidly building IoT software applications. The SDK provides an extensible framework for creating software ranging from specialized routines optimized for resource-constrained devices to software packages built for complex applications.

Figure 3 : The nRF Connect SDK offers a comprehensive software stack to accelerate the development of sophisticated IoT applications. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor)

The nRF Connect SDK code combines the open-source MCUBoot secure bootloader and open-source Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS), which is capable of scaling from memory-constrained systems to large memory configurations. Building on these combinations, Nordic’s nrf and nrfxlib packages provide the connectivity protocol stacks you need for BLE, Bluetooth mesh, Wi-Fi, Matter, and Thread/Zigbee. Middleware libraries provide hardware drivers, security firmware, and support connectivity protocols, including Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), among others.

Included in Nordic’s publicly available nRF Connect SDK repository, a wide range of sample applications provides a quick start for building your application source code. After building the code base with nRF Connect SDK, the Nordic environment’s use of configuration files (*.conf) and devicetree files (*.dts) lets you easily retarget your source code for different applications on various hardware configurations (Figure 4).

Figure 4 : Nordic’s software development framework simplifies the formulation of application source code that can be easily retargeted to build unique applications running on different hardware configurations. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor)

Conclusion

The demand for secure, multiprotocol connectivity has compounded challenges for IoT developers already facing shrinking delivery schedules. The Nordic Semiconductor nRF54L15 development kit provides a comprehensive hardware/software foundation for the rapid development of low-power IoT devices that can meet emerging requirements.