Bluetooth 5/Bluetooth LE module allows Panasonic Industry customers to develop applications for use in high RF interference environments

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that Panasonic Industry, one of the world’s leading multinational industrial solutions companies, has selected Nordic’s nRF52840 Bluetooth® 5/Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) advanced multiprotocol System-on-Chip (SoC) to power its ‘PAN1780 module’. The Nordic SoC’s 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with floating point unit (FPU) ensures the PAN1780 module can support the most complex IoT applications. The module is qualified over the full industrial –40º to 85º C operating temperature range.

The nRF52840’s Bluetooth 5 functionality enables OEMs selecting the PAN1780 module to take advantage of Bluetooth 5 Long Range functionality and increased throughput (2Mbps) in various Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, including smart cities, smart buildings, and industrial mesh networks. Bluetooth 5 Channel Selection Algorithm (CSA #2) enhances the module’s immunity to interference from other 2.4GHz RF signals making the product a good choice for use in high RF interference environments. Such immunity enhances link robustness, limiting packet retransmissions and saving power. Further, the module’s use of Bluetooth 5 Advertising Extensions increases the amount of data broadcast in connectionless scenarios such as beacon networks. 

In addition to the Arm M4 processor, Nordic’s nRF52840 SoC features a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio with on-chip PA providing -95dBm RX sensitivity (at 1Mbps in Bluetooth LE mode) and a maximum output power of 8dBm, for a total link budget of 103dBm. The SoC has 1MB Flash memory and 256kB RAM and is the only SoC able to concurrently support Bluetooth 5, Thread, and IEEE 802.15.4 protocols. Designed to address the inherent security challenges posed by the IoT, the nRF52840 SoC incorporates an Arm CryptoCell-310 cryptographic accelerator, offering best-in-class security.

 

The SoC is supplied with Nordic’s S140 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5-certified software protocol stack for building long range and high data Bluetooth LE applications. The S140 SoftDevice offers concurrent Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster, and Observer Bluetooth LE roles. OpenThread and Zigbee stacks are available through Nordic’s nRF5 SDK (software development kit) for Thread and Zigbee.

 

Together with the module, Panasonic provides developers with its PAN1780 Module Integration Guide covering reference designs, PCB layout considerations, peripherals, and how to get started using demos with the Nordic nRF5 SDK.

 

“We selected Nordic’s Bluetooth 5 nRF52840 SoC for our PAN1780 module because of the chip’s development flexibility and technical features including Bluetooth mesh/Thread/Zigbee/NFC, Arm M4 processor with FPU, RAM size, and long range capability,” says Lara von Rhein, Product Marketing Manager, Wireless Connectivity at Panasonic. “For years Panasonic customers have been asking for a Nordic-powered solution and with this addition to our range they now have one.”