The nRF52840 wins RF/Microwave category of Electronic Products magazine's "Product of the Year" awards

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that its nRF52840 System-on-Chip (SoC), an advanced, single-chip Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE)/Bluetooth 5, Thread 1.1, and Zigbee PRO solution, has been named winner of the “RF/Microwave” category by the judges of Electronic Products magazine’s 2018 “Product of the Year” Awards. The Product of the Year awards, now in its 43rd year, is a highly-regarded competition among the electronic engineering community.

The Editors of Electronic Products said they “undertook a rigorous vetting process of products launched in 2018 based on innovative design, significant advancement in technology or application, and substantial achievement in price and performance”.

Electronic Products is a U.S.-based B2B publication targeted at electronic design engineers and published by the AspenCore network. The winners of the awards in ten categories were announced in the January 2019 edition of the magazine with a cover feature and a brief description of each product. Electronic Products is circulated to 120,000 engineers across North America and the website receives 281,000 page-views per month.

Nordic’s nRF52840 multiprotocol SoC is the company’s most advanced ultra low power wireless solution. The SoC supports complex Bluetooth LE and other wireless applications that were previously not possible with a single-chip solution. The nRF52840 is Bluetooth 5-, Thread 1.1-, and Zigbee PRO (R21) and Green Power proxy specification-certified. The SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4F processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting concurrent wireless connectivity of Bluetooth 5 and Thread or Zigbee, in addition to ANT™, IEEE 802.15.4, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software). The SoC has 1MB Flash memory and 256kB RAM. An on-chip PA features -95dBm RX sensitivity (at 1Mbps Bluetooth LE), a maximum output power of 8dBm, and a total link budget of 103dBm. The chip supports all the features of Bluetooth 5 (including 4x the range or 2x the raw data bandwidth (2Mbps)) compared with Bluetooth 4.2.

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, and supports high throughput and long range modes as well as advertising extensions. OpenThread and Zigbee stacks are available through Nordic’s nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee.

“The nRF52840’s launch followed an extensive design and development process by the company’s engineering team and builds on Nordic’s many years of Bluetooth LE and low power wireless hardware and software expertise,” says Geir Langeland, Nordic’s Director of Sales & Marketing. “We are proud that those efforts have been appreciated by the nRF52840’s recognition as a winning solution in the highly competitive RF sector from the editors of a leading U.S. electronic design title.

• About Electronic Products' Product of the Year Awards
• About nRF52840
• About Nordic Semiconductor