Nordic announces support for Amazon Common Software for Devices to accelerate development of smart home products with support for Amazon services

Amazon Common Software (ACS) provides a single, unified API integration layer for multiple Amazon SDKs. This includes providing components that are pre-validated and memory-optimized for common smart home product functionalities.

 

Amazon says ACS is designed to benefit any developer building products using Amazon device SDKs by giving them the ability to use pre-built, pre-hardened, and pre-validated software components. This will accelerate integration of Amazon Device SDKs and help reduce both development and maintenance cost. 

 

Amazon adds that ACS also includes an extensive test suite that can be used to verify and debug an ACS implementation. By building on ACS, implementers can expect to launch devices more quickly and easily than before, using some of the same technology that Amazon uses in its own devices. 

Nordic Semiconductor intends to provide and maintain a Device Porting Kit (DPK) for its wireless chips that allows them to be easily and natively integrated into ACS as one of its reference platforms. Initial DPKs will be based on Bluetooth LE, with other wireless technologies to follow in the future.

 

“We’re happy that Amazon recognizes the value that Nordic Semiconductor brings through our multiple award-winning wireless chips and extensive customer base,” says Kjetil Holstad, Director of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor. “Our market leading nRF52® Series and the newly released nRF53® Series Bluetooth LE devices all offer very low power consumption, stellar security performance, and a high amount of on-chip memory which makes them perfect for the type of advanced smart home products Amazon envisions for their ACS initiative. We’re looking forward to working with Amazon and the device makers using their services to build some great new applications.”

 

Nordic’s nRF52840 System-on-Chip (SoC) is Bluetooth 5-, Thread 1.1-, and Zigbee PRO (R21) and Green Power proxy specification-certified and its Dynamic Multiprotocol feature uniquely supports concurrent wireless connectivity of the protocols in smart home applications. The SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with floating point unit (FPU) and a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio, 1MB Flash memory and 256kB RAM. The SoC incorporates an Arm CryptoCell™-310 cryptographic accelerator and is supplied with Nordic’s S140 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5-certified software protocol stack for building long range and high data Bluetooth LE applications. OpenThread and Zigbee stacks are available through Nordic’s nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee.

 

The Nordic nRF5340 SoC is based around dual Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors; a high performance application processor running up to 128 MHz (510 CoreMark) with dedicated 1 MB Flash and 512 KB RAM, and a fully programmable, ultra low power network processor running at 64 MHz (238 CoreMark) with dedicated 256 KB Flash and 64 KB RAM. The SoC features enhanced dynamic multiprotocol support enabling concurrent Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth mesh/Thread/Zigbee operation for provisioning/commissioning and interaction with a mesh network. It incorporates Arm CryptoCell-312, Arm TrustZone® technology, and Secure Key Storage for the highest level of security. The nRF5340’s nRF Connect SDK integrates the Zephyr RTOS, a Bluetooth LE protocol stack, application examples, and hardware drivers.