Wireless MCU modules cover Bluetooth LE 5.4, Thread and Matter

ALMA-B10x versions are built around Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF54H20 wireless microcontrollers and have dual 320MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores, dual 320MHz RISC-V cores, plus 2Mbyte of non-volatile memory and 1Mbyte ram. They also support NFC-A.

NORA-B20x versions have Nordic’s nRF54L15 chip with a single 128MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core that scores 505CoreMark said u-blox. They have direction finding support for indoor positioning, and also support Zigbee.

“ALMA-B1 is a high-end wireless MCU, while NORA-B2 brings ultra-low power to less complex applications,” according to u-blox. “In the indoor positioning example, ALMA-B1 could act as an anchor point due to its vast processing capabilities, while the power efficiency of NORA-B2 makes it suitable for asset tracking tags – ALMA-B1 can even replace general-purpose MCUs.”

That said, only a single consumption figure is available at all so far, and that is 2mA for ALMA-B10x in receive-only mode. Power rails are 1.7 – 5.5V for ALMA and 1.71 – 3.6V for NORA versions. Temperature ranges are -40 to +105°C and -40 to +85°C respectively.

Both come in a 10.4 x 11.2 x 1.9mm Bxx1 version that needs an external antenna, and a 10.4 x 14.3 x 1.9mm Bxx6 version with an on-board antenna (pictured).

The ALMA-B10x Bluetooth radios are rated at 13dBm with an estimate of 1,400m range, the NORA-B20x radios for 10dBm with range to be determined. ALMA versions list CAN-FD among their interfaces.

Protection features for all include: secure boot, secure storage, secure debug interface, hardware crypto accelerators, Arm’s TrustZone, physical tamper detection and side-channel defense.

These are not available yet – samples are scheduled for Q3 this year.

Find ALMA-B10x on this web page and NORA-B20x here