nRF5340 Bluetooth® with Arm® Cortex®-M33

Nordic Semiconductor's nRF5340 is a wireless SoC with two Arm Cortex-M33 processors, supporting Bluetooth 5.2, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, and Zigbee® wireless protocols. The two flexible processors combined with the advanced security features and up to +105°C operating temperature make the nRF5340 SoC the ideal choice for professional lighting, advanced wearables, and other complex IoT applications. The SoC has comprehensive wireless protocol support. It supports Bluetooth Low Energy and is capable of all features in Bluetooth 5.2, including direction-finding. All features of Bluetooth 5 are also supported, including 2 Mbps, long-range, and advertising extensions. It also supports wireless mesh protocols like Bluetooth mesh, Thread, and Zigbee, and other wireless protocols like NFC, ANT, 802.15.4, and 2.4 GHz proprietary.

The high-performance application processor clocks up 128 MHz, has 1 MB Flash and 512 KB RAM, is DSP and floating-point capable, and has 8 KB 2-way associated cache. The efficient network processor has 256 KB Flash and 64 RAM, is fully programmable and is optimized for low power radio operation and low duty-cycle sensor collection. The SoC supports an operating temperature up to +105°C, and together with its support for multiple mesh protocols and its advanced security features, it is ideally suited for professional lighting and industrial applications. Coupling the high-performance processor with the generous 512 KB RAM, the SoC is ready for the next generation of advanced wearables and smart watches. The QSPI peripheral is augmented to interface with external memory at 96 MHz, and the 32 MHz high-speed SPI (HS-SPI) can be utilized with displays and complex sensors.

The nRF5340 SoC integrates Arm CryptoCell-312 and Arm TrustZone technology for the highest level of security. It has advanced security features like trusted execution, root-of-trust, and secure key storage. Arm TrustZone provides hardware isolation for trusted software by having secure and non-secure code execution on a single core. With Arm CryptoCell-312, the most commonly used encryption standards can be hardware accelerated. The nRF Connect SDK is the software development kit for the nRF5340, offering a complete solution that integrates the Zephyr RTOS, protocol stacks, application samples, and hardware drivers. nRF Connect SDK is publicly hosted on GitHub, offers source code management with Git, and has free SEGGER Embedded Studio IDE support.

The nRF5340 PDK is the preview development kit for the nRF5340 SoC. It is affordable and has everything needed for development on a single board. All features and GPIOs of the nRF5340 SoC are made available to the developer, and it comes with an on-board SEGGER J-Link debugger enabling programming and debugging. The nRF5340 PDK is a preview development kit for evaluation purposes only. It will be replaced by the nRF5340 DK when the nRF5340 SoC is closer to being ready for production.

The nRF5340 can leverage the nRF Connect SDK, where developers can begin building their short-range wireless applications. The nRF Connect SDK offers developers an extensible framework for building very small applications in highly constrained circumstances, but also the ability to develop powerful, richly featured software for advanced applications. It integrates the Zephyr RTOS and a wide range of samples, application protocols, protocol stacks, libraries, and hardware drivers. The nRF Connect SDK is publicly hosted on GitHub, offers source code management with Git, and has free SEGGER Embedded Studio IDE support. For the nRF5340, the nRF Connect SDK contains all needed software, including protocol stacks.