Since Nordic Semiconductor released the S130 SoftDevice for our nRF51 ICs in early 2015, we have been working hard to make our Bluetooth low energy protocol stacks more feature rich and more configurable than ever before. The S130 now does everything our previous nRF51 compatible SoftDevices did and more, and the S132 brings all the same features to the nRF52 Series.
Some of the headlines for developers of Bluetooth Smart products:
nRF52 Series support
The nRF52832 IC now available in production from Nordic Semiconductor opens up a range of possibilities for products due to its significant compute power and power efficiency. The S132 enables new Bluetooth Smart System on Chip applications and provides a configurable and powerful platform for future-proofing your designs.
LE Secure Connections
Version 4.2 of the Bluetooth Specification introduced an option to use of Public Key Cryptography for the generation of security keys to strengthen applications against “man in the middle” attacks. This means that applications can now select the mode of operation when performing a pairing or bonding procedure:
- Legacy pairing
- LE Secure Connections
The SoftDevice gives the application developer the flexibility to choose an implementation of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) functions required for LE Secure Connections so they are in control and can re-use libraries that might already be a part of the product security suite. An implementation of ECC is also provided in our nRF5 SDK to use with the SoftDevice.
Configurable Connections
The application developer can now configure the number of connections and the BLE roles for connections so only the required data memory is used by the SoftDevice. From 0 to 8 connections can be configured for beacon to smart watch applications. Up to 8 Central connections, 1 peripheral connection and a Broadcaster or Observer can be configured to run concurrently allowing a device to be connected to 8 sensors and a mobile phone and send beacon packets all at the same time. If you have a less complex application, the stack can be configured to run fewer connections concurrently and more data memory (RAM) can be made available to your application. This is especially useful for memory constrained applications designed for the nRF51 Series ICs with 16 to 32kB of RAM.
Configurable Bandwidth
You can now configure the SoftDevice for the type of throughput performance your application demands. Receive and Transmit bandwidth can now be configured for any connection at runtime using simple to use Low, Medium or High configurations to make 1, 3, or 6 packets available for data per BLE connection event. This gives the application control over the amount of time spent in each BLE connection event for a given connection to tune your application network for optimal performance. For example, simple sensor connections should not use a lot of connection time may be configured as Low bandwidth connections while a connection to a phone or tablet may enable a better user-experience if it is configured as a High bandwidth connection. As with configurable connections, only the memory you require to support your connection bandwidth is used by the SoftDevice.
Configurable Attribute Table
More control of the size and contents of the GATT Attribute Table is now possible to save memory for simple applications and to allow greater flexibility for proprietary profiles and complex applications.
PA/LNA control
Power Amplifiers and Low Noise Amplifiers are now able to be controlled by the SoftDevice via GPIO when this interface is configured by the application. The SoftDevice ensures these circuits are only enabled on Transmit or Receive as needed to optimize power performance.
There is more…
These are some of the major features of our SoftDevice release. More in release notes… etc…
