Recommended SoC for years of battery life.

[egamez]

Hello

I am new to Nordic's product line. I would like to know if there is a recommended Bluetooth 5 SoC for wearable products that require years of battery life. For example, what would be used in a heart rate monitor?

Thank you.

[endnode]

Well, there are spec sheets and marketing materials released by vendors like Nordic, CSR, TI, NXP, ST, Silabs, Cypress/Broadcom, Toshiba, EM etc. All claim low power usage or even best in class power consumption but it's always based on benchmark which suits their product of course. Basically all latest designes from these vendors are able to run sensor beacon meaning gathering data from some low-power sensor (e.g. temperature) over I2C/SPI/UART and then broadcasting the value over BLE every 1~10seconds for 1y+ on coin cell battery like CR2032 or bigger.

Now the problem is more complex. If you want to do it really properly you should pre-select 3-5 based on spec sheets and pricing and then do some PoC with them and your own measurements because you cannot blindly believe marketing materials or advises from some random folks on internet forums like this one;) From Nordic we can all highly recommend nRF52832 or nRF52810, they should definitely be in your short list. Then depending on how complex your use case is you can use Nordic Soft Device or Zephyr or even some custom stack to achieve best power savings (the best power efficiency seems to be with external low-power RTC chip to wake nRF52 periodically and then using SYSTEM OFF mode which should go as low as [email protected]~1.8V