Although the development of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is constantly advancing, the connectivity between devices remains a persistent challenge for designers. Ten years ago, designing devices that early IoT users could easily connect to was a challenge. Nowadays, IoT devices not only require seamless connectivity out of the box, but also must ensure secure connectivity across heterogeneous networks while extending battery life. For developers who need to quickly respond to competitive pressure, shortening delivery times will further complicate IoT design. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to find a feature rich development kit that can adapt to a comprehensive ecosystem for low-power wireless system on chip (SoC) devices. A development kit of this type provided by Nordic Semiconductor can meet all requirements.
Nordic's nRF54L15 is a development kit based on the nRF54L15-DK evaluation board (Figure 1), designed to accelerate IoT design using Nordic's nRF54L series wireless SoC (including nRF54L15). This development kit can also simulate nRF54L10 and nRF54L05 devices. In addition to the complete hardware design files, the kit also includes a circuit board that provides you with a complete wireless development platform equipped with Nordic's nRF54L15 wireless SoC, 8 MB external flash memory, power management IC, and 2.4 GHz and Near Field Communication (NFC) antennas.
Figure 1: The nRF54L15-DK development board integrates the nRF54L15 wireless SoC, flash memory, power management IC, and connector, forming a comprehensive hardware platform that supports rapid deployment of secure multi protocol IoT devices. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor)
In addition to a set of debugging connectors and power analysis connectors, this development board also provides you with multiple user interface components, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and buttons for manual interaction during software debugging and execution. Three sets of connectors lead to the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) port of the SoC, allowing you to fully control the wireless SoC built specifically for battery powered IoT applications.
Specially designed for low-power IoT applications
Nordic's nRF54L wireless SoC series is one of Nordic's fourth generation low-power Bluetooth (BLE) SoCs. Nordic's technological strength is fully reflected in its comprehensive combination of features and performance, which is exactly what you need when designing multi protocol connectivity and extended battery life solutions. All products in the nRF54L series adopt the same architecture, with the difference being the size of non-volatile memory (NVM) and random access memory (RAM), with nRF54L15 having the largest capacity of 1.5 MB and 256 KB, respectively.
This architecture is built on a pair of processors (Figure 2), including the Arm Cortex-M33 main core and Nordic's self-developed RISC-V coprocessor. When the Arm Cortex-M33 processor is processing applications, it hands over time critical tasks to the RISC-V core, providing low latency processing for the architecture's I/O, timers, and peripherals.
Figure 2: The nRF54L wireless SoC integrates Arm Cortex-M33, RISC-V coprocessor, multi protocol transceiver, and a variety of peripherals. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor)
The nRF54L architecture eliminates people's ongoing concerns about more secure IoT devices and implements multiple key security enhancements, including Arm TrustZone, tamper proof, encryption acceleration, authenticated debugging, secure key storage, and an immutable boot zone for establishing a trust root. Taken together, these features provide the necessary foundation for secure wireless updates, secure boot, and secure execution of trusted applications.
For wireless communication, the Arm Cortex-M33 processor is responsible for handling the execution of multi protocol wireless stacks. This processor, when used in conjunction with an integrated low-power multi protocol 2.4 GHz transceiver, can provide 8 decibels (based on 1 milliwatt (dBm) transmit power) and -96 dBm receive sensitivity.
The synergy of stack resources and hardware functionality will ensure that your design supports various leading connectivity technologies and IoT protocols, including Bluetooth 6.0, BLE, Zigbee, Thread, Matter, Amazon Sidewalk, and proprietary 2.4 GHz protocols, with speeds up to 4 megabits per second (Mb/s). If your IoT device still needs to support coexistence with Wi Fi, the Arm Cortex-M33 processor will run the Wi Fi stack of the Nordic nRF70 series Wi Fi companion chip. This chip can easily connect to Nordic nRF series SoCs, such as the nRF54L series.
The nRF54L wireless SoC fully meets the requirements of BLE Core 6.0 and has functions such as Bluetooth channel detection. Channel detection technology can achieve revolutionary precision and secure ranging capabilities to meet the needs of the new generation of electronic tags, smart door locks, household appliances, and asset tracking systems.