Nordic Semiconductor Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding solution named as 2019 Electronics Weekly Elektra Awards finalist

Nordic Semiconductor today announces it has been shortlisted as a 2019 Elektra Awards finalist for its nRF52811 System-on-Chip (SoC), a fully-featured connectivity solution that supports Bluetooth® 5.1 Direction Finding and a range of popular low power wireless protocols for applications such as gateways for smart home and industry products. The nRF52811 SoC was recognized in the highly competitive “Semiconductor of the Year – Digital” category.

An annual program that celebrates technical, business, and personal achievement across the global electronics industry, the Electronics Weekly Elektra Awards recognizes companies and individuals across 20 categories. A panel of judges, including designers, engineers, and members of the technical media, reviewed submissions based on the product’s degree of technical innovation, performance parameters, and its ability to open up new markets and applications, before arriving at the decision to honor Nordic’s Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding solution.

The nRF52811 SoC enables positioning solutions to not only rely on received signal strength indicator (RSSI), but also the actual direction of a signal. This improves accuracy significantly and opens up new applications. This offers a basis for centimeter precision positional estimates in two- or three-dimensions by the Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle-of-Departure (AoD) methods. The SoC is the ideal choice as a transceiver for both the AoA and AoD scenarios because its radio seamlessly supplies the IQ data which forms the basis of the direction-finding calculation. The nRF52811’s powerful 64 MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor and 192kB Flash and 24kB RAM memory provide ample processor and memory overhead for supervising single-antenna “tag” elements of a location services application such as asset tracking in a cost-effective package.

The Elektra Awards winners will be announced at a gala dinner on the 4th December 2019 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London.