Understanding of hardware around of 52833 and 5340 required for direction finding implementation

[Pret]

Hello

We're a startup company focusing on innovative smart home and security technology solutions, evaluating our way into beacon/locator design to support BLT 5.1 capabilities, in particular, direction-finding

I realize there are three nRF chips currently available to support both AoA and AoD: 52820, 52833 and 5340

Few questions I'd appreciate to get clarified:

1. Do these devices include an internal antenna switcher or the RF switch shall be implemented separately on the PCB and controlled by the aforementioned devices (through GPIO's ?)

2. There were multiple threads here in the forum asking for the direction-finding support from 52833/5340 hardware DK/SDK demo, but those questions were in quite far past (a year ago and farther). So trying again - does Nordic have now probably support for such demo in the current hardware DK and SDK for these devices?

3. If neither of 52833/5340 has an integrated RF switch, what are recommended parts to accomplish that task?

4. Does the direction-finding require more frequent transmitting cycles for beacon in the case of AoA than it would be without the direction-finding? (i.e. for instance, without direction-finding  - using long intervals of 0.5-1sec to preserve battery) ? Are we constrained by the 5.1 prescribing minimum allowable CTE transmission sessions per second? Or this is only limited by the required application performance as a locator?

Thank you

Alex

[Simonr]

Hi Alex

There are actually four nRF SoCs supporting BLE Direction Finding: The nRF52811, nRF52820, nRF52833, and the nRF5340.

1. The RF switch will have to be implemented separately on the PCB and must be controlled by GPIOs on the device. Please check out our Direction Finding Whitepaper if you haven't already, which describes how to get started, configure, and enable the Bluetooth Direction Finding features for nRF52 and nRF53 devices.

2. We still do not have any publicly available example projects I'm afraid, so you still have to contact our Sales department for more information on this. You can get in touch with the Regional Sales Manager of your area by filling out our Sales Related Questions form here.

3 and 4. This should be described in the Direction Finding whitepaper.

Best regards,

Simon

[Pret]

Thank you very much, Simon, I'll check out the whitepaper

Few further questions:

1. Do you think there is a good reasoning to opt for 5340 at the receiver side to implement AoA algorithmic calculations  in the application core ? Or the 52833 single core is good enough for that along with operating the communication stack ?

2. I notice the 5340 features lower TX (and RX) current consumption per the same output power than the 52833 and also allows more granulation in TX gain (in 1dBm AFAIK while 52833 in 2dBm is I'm not wrong). If implementing the Beacon side with 5340, and not using the application core, is it still be beneficial over 52833 in terms of averaged power consumption and probably finer TX power tuning per localized territorial requirements ? Of the application core will still consume some power even when not used and that neglects the benefit of lower TX consumption during transmision ?

Thank you

Alex