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!

[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.