Bluetooth LE SoC promises ‘multiple Arm Cortex-M33’ and RISC-V

Part of a forthcoming nRF54 series, the new IC, nRF54H20, will be fabricated on GlobalFoundries’ 22FDX process and “capable of supporting Bluetooth 5.4 and future Bluetooth specifications, plus LE Audio, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, Matter and more” said Nordic. “Its combination of features will enable complex end-products that have previously been unfeasible.”

The company remains tight-lipped about how many processors, but did say: “Each processor is optimised for a specific type of workload. The dedicated application processor features double the processing power of the application processor in the nRF5340 SoC.”

As a guide: Nordic attributes the earlier dual Cortex-M33 nRF5340 with 514 CoreMark and 66 CoreMark/mA at 128MHz, and 257 CoreMark and 73 CoreMark/mA at 64MHz.

The new part, nRF54H20, will get 2Mbyte of non-volatile memory and 1Mbyte of ram, and of it Nordic also claims that it will be “ideal for complex machine learning and support for sensor fusion at the edge”.

It will get a 400Mbyte/s external memory interface, 480Mbit/s USB, dual I3C, a CAN FD controller and a 14bit ADC.

The multi-protocol 2.4GHz radio is all-new, according to the company, with -100dBm Rx sensitivity (1Mbit/s Bluetooth LE) and up to 10dBm Tx power. “Rx current consumption is half that of the nRF5340”, it claimed.

Again for reference: nRF5340 literature (linked below) claims 2.7mA Rx consumption at 1Mbit/s and 3.1mA at 2Mbit/s (from 3V via dc-dc).

On-chip security is designed for PSA Certified Level 3 and supports secured: boot, firmware update and storage. It’s cryptographic accelerators are hardened against side-channel attacks, said Nordic, and tamper sensors detect and act on an attack-in-progress.

The device is sampling to selected customers.

The nRF54H20 product page currently has no further information

For above comparisons: here is a product brief for the earlier nRF5340