TI CC2640 Vs nRF51822 for BLE product design

[Lakerno]

I am trying to choose a BLE device for my upcoming biomedical product design. Any help in comparing these 2 devices will be greatly appreciated.

Things I am concerned about are

1. overall cost( including development costs, compiler costs + all other costs)
2. development support(I am a newbie designer, i need all the development support in PCB design + BLE stack modification etc) 3)Community support 4)Reference designs etc. 5)Chip power consumption. (i can see this from data sheets, but do I need to know anything more) 6)Anything else is important?

Anyone compared these 2 chipsets? Thank you!

[Lakerno]

I just realized that nRF51822 has a cortex m0 , while cc2640 has a cortex m3. Does anyone know, if nordic is coming up with an integrated cortex m3 + BLE device? Thank you!

[Clem Taylor]

The cc2640 is an interesting part. It has the Cortex-M3 as the main processor and the radio sub-system has an integrated Cortex-M0. So they can offload all the real-time BLE stuff to the Cortex-M0 without waking up the Cortex-M3. I'd imagine that the upcoming nRF52 will have a similar multi-core design.

They also bolted on some sort of proprietary RISC processor for low power monitoring task. If they were being sane they would just use another Cortex-M0, but I'd this is IP from some other project and transistors are cheap.

The RF core has only has 4KB of SRAM and a chunk of ROM. I'm not really a fan of chips like this that use ROM for core functionality. ROM is fine for a bootloader as long as it is simple and heavily constrained but it often sucks for something like BLE.

The odd thing is the part only has 128K of flash which could easily be a limiting factor for many applications.

[RK]

Starting with your second question - I have no idea what Nordic is coming out with but whatever it is will be announced June 17th, one month from now. All we know about the NRF52 is that Nordic's calling it a 'game changer'. I know what I'd like to see on the new chip, but really I have no idea what they are coming up with. My guess would be something similar to the TI product, but I'm prepared to be very wrong.

I have the CC2650 dev kit as well as lots of Nordic stuff. I got a little put off by TI's development environment. This may be because I'm so used to Nordic at this point, but I fired up Code Composer studio (which isn't awfully nice) and a couple of the examples, built them and the whole process seems designed to shield the programmer from ever working out exactly what's going on. The Code Composer packs run little scripts beforehand and external tools afterwards which obfuscate what's actually being compiled and linked. My aim was to use the OSX open source tools I use for Nordic, I haven't yet even got close to being able to do that despite this being the first TI chip which technically is open source tool usable.

To your actual questions

1. overall cost - lower with Nordic at this point, the TI chip is quite expensive 2 + 3) development support - I've always had great support from Nordic, that said I've found the TI support forums helpful in my limited experience. I think Nordic's easier to develop for.
2. That TI chip is very low power, it's true, again we're all waiting on the NRF52. The TI chip's low power comes at a cost of some complexity, 2 cortex processors plus the extra custom one.

Summary - I much prefer the Nordic infrastructure and development environment. The new TI chip looks very interesting. If the NRF52 builds on what Nordic already has in terms of development resources and adds some of the features the CC2650 has, it's going to be the best platform.

[SRA]

1 year later - I'm looking at this same CC2650 vs nRF52... I have the advantage of knowing now exactly what the nRF52 now is but...

You were mostly right. The TI does cost more, and the 128kb is too limiting for my application. The nRF52 didn't go to separate core, but that's slightly offset by the fact that unlike the TI, the nRF52 is upgradable.

I figured an update would be helpful for someone in case they also find their way here.