nRF52840 SoftDevice, longevity of support

[mstevens]

Hello team,

Is there a standard Nordic policy for longevity of SoftDevice updates and continued support for a device once it has been deemed "mature"?  Context: I'm beginning a design with nRF52840 and I'd like to know for how long Bluetooth stack updates will be provided to patch things such as newly discovered security flaws or performance enhancements.  Eventually, at some point, any device will be deemed too mature for continued software updates but the question is how long until that decision is made?  Five years?  Ten years? More?

Thank you.  

[Susheel Nuguru]

Hi Michael,

We are a company that takes security on our devices seriously, so it does not matter how mature the product is, if we have recognized any security inconsistencies. If the patch needs to be in the software, then we will give you a new patched released for that chip (which most likely will be a minor version incremented from the latest release for that chip).

If the patch can be applied in the application side, then we will give you clear instructions on how to patch the code. 

We still are selling our product which are more than a decade and half old and it will not be possible to do that if we cannot support our customers in issues like you mentioned. 

At the same time we also recommend our customers to switch to newer chip versions (just because it is more cost worthy on both sides)