nRF51 or nRF52 in new production design

[Paul]

I have been using nRF51 since 2013 in a lot of product. Haven't paid a lot of attention to nRF52 series because nRF51 has been a working horse and enough for our applications. Now I am just wondering if I need to switch nRF52 before Nordic stops supporting nRF51 series.

I am planning to use nRF52 in my next design. Just want to hear different opinions from other people with more experience on both.

Thanks

Paul

[endnode]

I don't think Nordic would stop supporting nRF51 any time soon (maybe someone from Nordic support team will comment;) but it's true that they limit development of tools and other SW support items for nRF51 to almost zero (both radio stacks and SDK are frozen for almost a year now, they probably release some patch only if it's critical).

My experience (being mainly SW guy but having feedback from several HW teams): nRF52 is more capable platform which in most applications deliver better performance at lower average power consumption. Moreover BOM cost (thanks to integrated balun and other details) is almost the same as nRF51 (of course this might be influenced by specific large volume deals) so we went for nRF52 in all new designs since beginning of 2016. Porting of FWs from nRF51 to nRF52 (and respective newer BLE stacks) was matter of few weeks.

[John]

I think going with the nRF52 for the reasons endnode states is the way to fly. Our HW guys absolutely love the lower power consumption. The FW transition took about 1 week flat out to get something running and probably another 1 week total of little odds and ends that were missed in the initial transition. If you do the conversion at the start of a project, you will likely never see an impact on anything other than the tightest of schedules.

Keep in mind that the initial week of transition included not only going to the nRF52, but upgrading the SDK by about 4 major revisions at the same time.