When I first saw the name of the series from Nordic Semiconductor, namely nRF51, I thought to myself "Oh God! These guys are doing great RF, but still use the good old 8051 processor -- what a shame!". Fortunately, I was misled by the family naming, and discovered Nordic picked just the right thing: an ARM Cortex-M0!
Taking a bit more time to go into the details published by Nordic, I expect it to generate quite a lot of interest. With support for the latest protocols like Bluetooth Low-Energy and ANT+, great RF performance in terms of RX sensitivity and TX power, this series should be compelling to most companies looking for an RF link for medical, building automation or consumer applications. And last but not least, the achieved low-power consumption combined with limited peak consumption make it well suited for battery operation, making this family a great candidate to connect devices wirelessly to the Internet of Things.
Also very interesting to me is the maximal frequency of the processor which is limited to 16MHz. It could look quite low at first glance, especially to run such a communication stack, but this is another good demonstration that the right trade-off to optimize energy consumption is to use an efficient processor while keeping the system frequency low.
This is also a good example that companies with a strong competence in their field can concentrate on their domain of expertise, while relying on a state-of-the-art standard processor without having to reinvent the wheel. It saves resources; and by selecting ARM, companies automatically get the support of the widest Embedded ecosystem.
Looking forward what's next on Nordic's roadmap! For more information read the article here.
This is a WAU for this morning - there is more in the deep specifications that make this product a super thing - pretty much first time it will be possible to make single chip ANT+ systems (we are ANT+ licensee but the dual chip solution never appealed!). So far the ANT protocol was always delivered as pre-programmed IC, now ANT stack can be linked to the main application code in the same chip. And all stacks communicate over SVC - nice! Real good! One more reason why I got so excited is that we are just about to complete our own first Cortex-M0 based SoC ourself, thanks to the Processor DesignStart licensing, and we are pretty much satisfied with our design also - mainly because of all the infra-structure offered by ARM: if all is done "the ARM way™" - then many things JUST GO RIGHT by itself! SoC design should not be started with RTL coding, but writing SVD file, ARM tools will validate it, convert to SFR and .H files, and uVision debugger will use this information to display your virtual peripherals in simulator. Long before you have done any hardware tests. And doxygen documentation comes out also as another benefit.
I have been talking to everyone that 2012 is the year of ARM Revolution because: