Nordic upgrades Bluetooth LE SoC family

Nordic Semiconductor has unveiled an addition to its nRF54 Series of Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) system-on-chip (SoCs) for the next generation of wireless IoT products in medical/healthcare, smart home, industrial IoT, VR/AR, PC accessories, remote controllers and gaming controller applications. The new nRF54L15 is the first Bluetooth LE SoC in the nRF54L Series, delivering increased processing power and efficiency, more memory and lower power consumption. The ultra-low-power Bluetooth 5.4 SoC also includes a new multiprotocol radio and advanced security features in a compact package.

The nRF54L15 SoC features an Arm Cortex-M33 processor running at 128 MHz, providing twice the processing power of the nRF52840 SoC while reducing power consumption. It is supported by 1.5 MB of non-volatile memory and 256 KB of RAM for concurrent running of multiple protocols.

(Source: Nordic Semiconductor)

The nRF54L15 SoC incorporates advanced hardware and software security designed for PSA Certified Level 3, the highest in the PSA Certified IoT security standard. Security features include secure boot, secure firmware update, secure storage, as well as protection against physical attacks thanks to integrated tamper sensors and cryptographic accelerators hardened against side-channel attacks.

The SoC’s new long-range multiprotocol radio provides up to 8-dBm TX power (with 1-dB increments) and -98-dBm RX sensitivity for 1 Mbits/s BLE. In addition, the radio features a new 4-Mbits/s data rate option for 2.4-GHz proprietary protocols, offering improved throughput, efficiency and latency, Nordic said. It supports all Bluetooth 5.4 features, Bluetooth Mesh and future Bluetooth spec updates as well as Thread and Matter.

Compared with the nRF52 series, the radio power consumption of the nRF54L15 offers significant improvements in TX and RX. For example, the radio RX current is cut in half, on a 1.8 VDC supply, delivering energy savings and allowing for smaller batteries or extended battery life.

Greater energy savings come from a new global real-time clock peripheral that can wake up the SoC from its deepest sleep mode, eliminating the need for an external RTC and reducing power consumption when applications sleep for long durations. Other new peripherals include a 14-bit ADC and a software-defined peripheral enabled by a RISC-V coprocessor.

The nRF54L15 is available to select customers for sampling. It is available in a 6 × 6-mm QFN package with 31 GPIOs, and in an ultra-compact 2.4 × 2.2-mm WLCSP with 32 GPIOs (300-µm pitch) and 14 GPIOs (350-µm pitch). These WLCSPs are more than 50 percent smaller than the nRF52840 WLCSP, making them suitable for designs with strict size constraints.