Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Dave_couling — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 23:12:25 GMT

Hoping for an bigger RF Link Budget. With the power consumption coming down, leaves more room to really hit the ceiling for Tx power (+8 or 10dB) and increased Rx sensitivity. Hoping for a Link Budget max >100dB. A man can dream can't he ;)

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 21:18:40 GMT

The IDAP-Link and IDAP-M are already mBed enabled on OS X. Connect your nRF51 board to it and it then use mBed online compiler. Put IDAP-M on your board to make an mBed board. No hassle. Works directly with Keil and others no drivers to install.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Clem Taylor — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 20:30:36 GMT

I can't see wifi happening, the power budget for 802.11 is out of scale with the budget for BLE. For BLE you can get away with a fairly simple radio and do everything in software. For wifi you need to implement far more of the protocol in hardware (pretty much the entire MAC). I'd imagine they could add hardware support for 802.15.4 (zigbee) without that much of a silicon area hit, it would just require a software investment for the protocol stack.

I'd imagine that the primary complaints they get from customers is 'lower power/more computes/more flash/more sram'. The switch to 55nm will give them a nice boost in the power budget, clock frequency and transistor budget. But they still have the problem that the BLE stack is somewhat hard realtime. So you can't use the nrf51 for timing critical things. They could move more of the protocol stack into hardware or they could just spilt the work. Have a dedicated core for BLE and a dedicated core for the user application. If it was me I wouldn't just throw down a pair of M0+s cores, but would go for the big/little solution. A small/slow/low voltage M0+ for the BLE stack and a larger/faster M3 for the user application.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Thomas — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 20:13:02 GMT

Wifi would be fantastic. If they announce Wifi as part of the product offering, I may have to change my pants :-)

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Oleh — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 19:59:56 GMT

IMHO, having BLE + ANT + Wifi = game changer. kind of nrf51+esp8266=nrf52 ;-)

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

cocoa — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 12:45:53 GMT

A wish for the future, Swift as a programming language for microcontrollers (read IoT). About Bluetooth (Smart) ... , as Apple philosophy, no low level control, but only the functions requested by Apple frameworks finalized to specific Apple use case. All Bluetooth Smart logic is implemented in CoreBluetooth, CoreLocation and HomeKit. Will be interesting to see if the new nRF52 will be compliant with Apple HomeKit .

-c

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

RK — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 09:36:06 GMT

Don't really see your point there, we won't be writing embedded btle apps in Swift, but I do hope Swift 2 is better than Swift 1 which was a disappointing mess. And none of that is related MBED's lip-service-only support for OSX about which I was complaining.

I also note that there are no WWDC sessions this year on Bluetooth. I was hoping for some new API, more control of the connection from within iOS and the splitting up of the Master/Slave and Server/Peripheral connection which CoreBluetooth has perpetuated since the beginning, access to flags and raw data etc. There's no API diffs I can see yet but .. not looking good.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

cocoa — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 09:26:38 GMT

Lot of fun is coming from OSX world ... Apple WWDC yesterday : "We are excited about the opportunities an open source Swift creates for our industry. Baked-in safety features combined with excellent speed mean it has the chance to dramatically improve software versus using C-based languages. Swift is packed with modern features, it’s fun to write, and we believe it will get used in a lot of places. Together, we have an exciting road ahead."

-c

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

RK — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 07:23:58 GMT

Segger just released JLink V5.00 and it has this tiny tidbit in it

Firmware: JLink-OB-SAM3U128-mbedBTL-NordicSemi: Updated MSD files for new nRF52 based boards

So we know there are NRF52 boards, they use JLink OB and that hopefully means they are both JLink and MBED enabled. I say hopefully because I never want to use MBED again after the complete utter and total lack of support they have for OSX.

Suspense is killing me ....

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Fredrik — Mon, 25 May 2015 07:56:53 GMT

Very exciting! Hoping for a CPU boost!

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Clem Taylor — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 19:25:39 GMT

Isn't the nrf51 on a 180nm process? From the TSMC press release they are switching to a 55nm process. So that is a ~10x increase in the transistor budget for the same sized die. Think of all the interesting things you could do with 10x the transistors.

I hope they switch to at least a M0+ to get rid of the interrupt trampoline sillyness.

A low frequency/voltage M0+ for the BLE stack and a higher frequency M[34] for the user app would be an 'easy' way to decouple the stack from the user app.

More universal DMA support (ie DMA for ADC, SPI, UART, etc). With my nrf51 design I'm spending way too much time servicing the SPI and I2C. I should just be able to set up a DMA and clock out a few K of data to the SPI bus without having to take an interrupt on every byte.

Capacitive sense hardware that only needs to wakeup the CPU on touch event would be much appreciated.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

RK — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 12:43:36 GMT

This is going to be an annoying 2 months wait, I want to know NOW!!

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Max C. — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 11:18:56 GMT

Currently in the Home Page is appeared a big image: "nRF52 series - prepare to meet The Game Changer - 17 June 2015" ...

A Bombastic hint :-)

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

cocoa — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 23:16:01 GMT

Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. – September 29, 2014 : TSMC

Svenn-Tore Larsen, CEO of Nordic Semiconductor : "We have been collaborating closely with TSMC on the selection of process technology for our upcoming nRF52 Series of ultra-low power RF SoCs. I am happy to announce that we have selected the TSMC 55ULP platform. This process is a key enabler for us to push the envelope on power consumption, performance and level of integration of the nRF52 Series to meet the future requirements of Wearable and Internet of Things applications.”

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Max C. — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:24:52 GMT

A dual-core would be wonderful: i have already seen a dual-core ultra low power, the M0+ core could be used for stack and radio computing while leaving the M3/M4 core at 100% use of the customer!

Anyway it could be enough for me to have a slightly faster core without the need to be blocked during radio activity (as the nRF51822 rev3) with 1/3 of the current power consumption and some improved peripherals (ADC 12 bit, more SPIs/I2Cs with integrated fifo and configurable interrupts in reception) and .... please use GCC as the main development platform :-))

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

John — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 12:27:19 GMT

Exactly! I'd love to have the ease of use of the nrf51 series with a dedicated M0 to run the radio and another Mx to run my application code.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

RK — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 12:12:51 GMT

You mean like an M3 to run code, a 2.4GHz radio and a a separate M0 to run the that and the stack, plus a nice clutch of peripherals? I have exactly such a chip in a dev board which arrived last week I've been evaluating. Great chip, nowhere near as nice to use as the nrf51 series although that may be partly my unfamiliarity with the way a certain other company packages their software. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing something like that come out of Nordic running a version of the stack we're all used to.

Shame that nobody who's talking knows, and nobody who knows, is talking!

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

John — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 11:57:43 GMT

I'm hoping for dual core.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Max C. — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 11:01:10 GMT

why not Cortex-M4? or maybe a M0+ at high frequencies

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

RK — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 10:31:43 GMT

oh no - I only just paid off the credit card bill on the latest NRF51 devkits. Time to start saving.

Hoping for Cortex-M3 .. I can dream.

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Max C. — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 10:07:54 GMT

i hope soon from the presentation, will be available some modules from 3rd parties !!!

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

Asbjørn — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:36:02 GMT

I've heard it's a game changer:)

RE: Any hints as to what's new in the rf52 series release?

ovrebekk — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:26:26 GMT

What's new in the nRF52 series? A lot I can tell you ;)

And in about two months time we will finally be able to talk about it :)