Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 Series-based Rigado Bluetooth Low Energy Modules Provide Powerful, Ultra-compact Wireless Solution for IoT and Wearables

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that U.S. engineering firm Rigado has selected Nordic’s next generation nRF52832 Bluetooth® low energy System-on-Chip (SoC) for its BMD-350 module. Fully certified to Bluetooth 4.2, the BMD-350 is a Bluetooth low energy module designed to provide developers of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable connected products with a plug-and-play solution that can lower development costs and speed time-to-market.
The module employs the 3 by 3.2mm wafer-level chip scale package (WL-CSP) variant of Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC which results in an 8 by 6.4 by 1.5mm form factor and makes the module suitable for a wide range of space-constrained, low power applications.
The nRF52832’s high performance 64MHz, 32-bit ARM® Cortex® M4F processor, along with a full range of programmable on-chip analog and digital peripherals that reduce demand on the processor’s resources, allows the module to power even the most complex wireless applications. In addition, the BMD-350 module provides up to 32 general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs), an integrated antenna, and +4dBm output power. It is also qualified over the full industrial -40° to 85° C industrial range.
As with Rigado’s other wireless modules, the BMD-350 benefits from the company’s DeviceOps tools for faster development and secure over-the-air firmware updates. These tools allow product design teams to speed up time-to-market for IoT product lines, reduce customer risk, and efficiently manage the secure future updating of device firmware and configuration.
Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth low energy SoC, a member of Nordic Semiconductor’s sixth generation of ultra low power (ULP) wireless connectivity solutions, combines the ARM M4F processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (fully compatible with Bluetooth 4.2, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF software) capable of -96 dB RX sensitivity, with 512 kB Flash memory and 64 kB RAM. When launched, the SoC was the world’s highest performance single-chip Bluetooth low energy solution, delivering up to 60 percent more generic processing power, offering 10 times the Floating Point performance and twice the DSP performance compared to competing solutions. The nRF52832 also features a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80 percent compared with Nordic’s nRF51 Series and an NFC™ tag for consumer-friendly Touch-to-Pair.
“Our clients, especially those creating commercial and wearable IoT devices are focused on reducing time to market and entry risk by leveraging our certified modules and software,” explains Ben Corrado, CEO of Rigado. “A plug-and-play Bluetooth low energy module, certified to the latest Bluetooth specification, that ranges well beyond 100 meters and is only the size of an aspirin, opens up a whole range of new applications.”
“For IoT products, customers expect their smart devices to stay smart and even ‘get smarter’ over time,” says Justin Rigling, Rigado’s VP of Engineering. “Our clients require the ability to update and extend their connected devices to maintain compatibility and also unlock new feature capabilities as those become available. The BMD-350 module’s over-the-air software update feature enables us to meet those expectations.”
“The pace of wireless development is rapidly accelerating as the IoT rolls out,” says Geir Langeland, Director of Sales & Marketing with Nordic Semiconductor. “That’s why it’s important that companies not only launch their Bluetooth low energy IoT products quickly but also that they can update the firmware and software of deployed sensors as new functionality is released. Rigado’s Nordic-powered BMD-350 IoT module allows companies to do both. Better yet, the compact size of the module allows its use for applications that would have previously been impractical.”
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