The nRF52811 from Nordic Semiconductor is a wireless SoC that supports Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding, Bluetooth 5 Long Range, 802.15.4, Thread, ANT and Zigbee. It includes a multiprotocol 2.4 GHz radio (featuring 4 dBm output power with -97 dBm sensitivity at 1 Mbps in Bluetooth 5 mode), 64 MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor, and 192 kB Flash and 24 kB RAM memory. The SoC is available in a 6 x 6 mm QFN48 package with 32 GPIOs, a 5 x 5 mm QFN32 with 17 GPIOs, and a 2.5 x 2.5 mm wafer level CSP32 with 15 GPIOs. It is accompanied by an updated version (v15.3.0) of Nordic’s nRF5 Software Development Kit (SDK).
The nRF52811 SoC’s Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding enables positioning solutions to not only rely just on the received signal strength indicator (RSSI), but also the actual direction of a signal. There are two types of methods for determining direction, angle of arrival (AoA), where the direction of the received signal is calculated, and angle of departure (AoD), where the direction of the transmitted signal is calculated. Direction finding can operate in either two or three dimensions depending on the selected design complexity and antenna array. The nRF52811 SoC is the ideal choice as a transceiver for both the AoA or AoD scenarios. Bluetooth 5.1 hardware functionality is built-in to the nRF52811 SoC.
