Nordic Semiconductor has announced the availability of a Wafer Level Chip Scale Package (WL-CSP) variant of their nRF52832 Bluetooth low energy (formerly known as Bluetooth Smart) System-on-Chip (SoC) that occupies a quarter of the footprint area of the standard-package and targets next-generation, high-performance wearables and space-constrained IoT applications.
The new variant of the nRF52832 has a super-compact 3.0 x 3.2 mm footprint compared to the standard 6.0 x 6.0 mm footprint of its larger but conventionally-packaged QFN48 cousin, yet offers the same full single-chip feature set and best-in-class, ultra-low-power application operation. This includes a powerful on-board 64 MHz ARM Cortex-M4F processor that enables protocol and application task processing to be completed in unprecedentedly short time-frames, thus allowing power-saving sleep modes to be entered much quickly compared to competing devices.
Like the nRF52832, the nRF52832 WL-CSP features: 512 kB Flash and 64 kB RAM, on-chip NFC tag for consumer-friendly Touch-to-Pair, and proprietary 2.4 GHz radio with 5.5mA peak RX/TX currents, an on-chip RF Balun with a unique fully-automatic power management system that makes achieving optimal power consumption easy for designers.
It is compatible with their Bluetooth 4.2 stacks and supporting SDKs including the latest S132 multi-role concurrent software stack, nRF5 SDK, nRF5 SDK for HomeKit, and nRF5 SDK for AirFuel (resonant wireless charging).
The availability of a super-compact footprint nRF52832 WL-CSP brings new design opportunities to wearables and other space-constrained IoT applications. The evolution of wearables to date has only ever gone one way: ever increasing performance and functionality in ever-slimmer, lighter, form factors. This is currently the smallest Bluetooth low energy SoC available on the market today.
