Nordic-powered module offers efficient UART-to-Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity, high link budget, and flexible data rates

LITE-ON, module

nRF51 Series Bluetooth LE SoC supports cost-effective ‘drop-in’ modular solution for healthcare, gaming, and IoT applications

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that LITE-ON, a Taipei, Taiwan-based optoelectronics developer, has selected Nordic’s Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) nRF51 Series System-on-Chip (SoC) as the basis of its LITE-ON WB100N module. The module provides a UART-to-Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity solution for various applications including medical devices, remote controls, gaming controllers, and Internet of Things (IoT) peripherals.

The nRF51 Series SoC offers a superior price/performance ratio that allows LITE-ON to offer a cost-effective “drop-in” modular wireless connectivity solution for a diverse range of customer applications. The SoC enables the WB100N module to support 250-kbps, 1-Mbps, and 2-Mbps raw data rates, and -97-dBm link budget (+4-dBm output and -93-dBm sensitivity). In addition to the UART I/O, the module offers an I2C-compatible interface and supports battery service, RSSI reports, AT commands, and password protection.
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Nordic provided the technical information, reference designs, and rapid response times we were looking for.
Vic Lin, Senior Specialist at LITE-ON

Nordic’s nRF51 Series is a family of flexible multiprotocol SoCs ideally suited for Bluetooth LE and 2.4GHz proprietary ultra low-power wireless applications. The nRF51 Series SoCs are built around a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™ M0 CPU, 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio, and 256kB/128kB Flash and 32kB/16kB RAM. The SoCs’ ample Flash memory allocation supports over-the-air device firmware updates (OTA-DFU), allowing manufacturers to upgrade software over the wireless link once the product is in the field. The SoCs are supplied with Nordic’s S130 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 4.2 qualified concurrent multilink protocol stack solution supporting simultaneous Central/Peripheral/Broadcaster/Observer role connections.

“We chose Nordic’s nRF51 Series SoCs for their hardware features such as the reduced size, competitive price, and wide availability, as well as impressive technical features including the radio sensitivity and ultra low power consumption,” says Vic Lin, Senior Specialist at LITE-ON. “From a software perspective, the availability of Nordic’s user-friendly Software Development Kits [SDKs] also played an important role in our decision.

“Nordic provided the technical information, reference designs, and rapid response times we were looking for.”