Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Called Nora-B1, at 10.4 x 14.3 x 1.8mm the modules are tiny, and they operate at up to 105°C for industrial and outdoor lighting use.
Bluetooth and MCU cores are supplied by a Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340 chip, around which the module family is built.
Both cores have integrated flash, integrated RAM and are available to run customer applications.
One core runs without being interrupted by network activity, is clocked at either 128 or 64Mhz, and is included for higher-performance applications. The other is optimised for low power, clocked at 64Mhz and is mainly dedicated to the wireless protocol stack, but has space for less demanding applications.
Security comes from Arm’s TrustZone virtualisation to separate secure and non-secure code, and Arm CryptoCell-312 “which provides hardware-accelerated cryptography and, in combination with the key management unit, enables a root of trust and secure key storage”, said U-blox.
Bluetooth 5.2 features such as ‘angle-of-arrival’, ‘angle-of-departure, long-range (estimated up to 700m) and low-energy audio are supported, as are Bluetooth Low Energy services such as serial port communication, GATT, beacons and mesh.
“Additionally, they support NFC and IEEE 802.15.4 with Thread and Zigbe,” according to U-blox, and microcontroller features include “UART, QSPI, SPI, I2C, I2S, USB, QDEC, PDM, PWM, and ADC.”
There are three Nora-B1 products, differing in their antenna set-up:
- NORA-B100 with U.FL connector for an external antenna
- NORA-B101 with antenna pin for an external antenna
- NORA-B106 with internal PCB antenna
The company sees the combination of dual core MCU, enhanced security and Bluetooth 5.2 suiting the module to applications including industrial machine control, asset tracking, remote controls, gateways, connected power tools (requiring continuous motor control) and medical wearables.
Samples are scheduled to be available in Q4 of this year.
This is a useful product summary
