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.