Nordic announces cooperation with Amazon to support development of Amazon Sidewalk compatible Bluetooth LE smart devices

21

Sep
2020

Oslo, Norway

Corporate

nRF52840

nRF5340

Bluetooth LE

Professional lighting

nRF53 Series

nRF52 Series

Amazon Sidewalk will support Bluetooth Low Energy to complement RF protocol using the 900 MHz band to provide greater connectivity around the home and beyond

Nordic Semiconductor today announces it is cooperating with Seattle-based Amazon to develop Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) solutions for Amazon Sidewalk. Amazon Sidewalk is a neighborhood network designed to help customer devices work better both at home and beyond the front door. Operated by Amazon at no charge to customers, Sidewalk helps simplify new device setup, extends the working range of low-bandwidth devices, and helps devices stay online and up-to-date even if they are outside the range of their home Wi-Fi

Extending the range of smart home devices

Equipped with multiple layers of security and privacy, the technology is based on a new protocol operating in the 900 MHz band. Amazon Sidewalk can extend the working range of many smart home applications to up to one kilometer, allowing consumers to position smart devices in places that the home wireless network previously failed to reach. For example, the 900 MHz technology could extend connectivity to a smart collar that could inform a dog owner that their pet has crossed the property boundary. Amazon Sidewalk will support Bluetooth LE to complement the protocol using the 900 MHz band to provide greater connectivity.

By cooperating with both Amazon Sidewalk and ACS, we will be able to help our customers build smart home products that will bring even greater convenience, flexibility and safety to consumers

Kjetil Holstad, Nordic Semiconductor

Nordic is collaborating with Amazon to ensure it can offer customers development support for Nordic’s Bluetooth LE solutions when used with Amazon Sidewalk technology.

Nordic is the leading Bluetooth LE company (based on Bluetooth LE end-product certifications*). By teaming with Amazon, Nordic makes it easier for its huge customer base to access the benefits of Amazon Sidewalk and its associated ecosystem. Amazon Sidewalk will particularly benefit Bluetooth LE applications for the smart home and asset tracking – strategic market sectors for Nordic and thousands of its Bluetooth LE customers.

Building on previous cooperation

Nordic’s support for Amazon Sidewalk follows on from the company’s cooperation with Amazon Common Software (ACS), a platform to help accelerate the development of smart home and other wireless products. Nordic Semiconductor intends to provide and maintain a Device Porting Kit (DPK) for its wireless chips that allows them to be easily and natively integrated into ACS as one of its reference platforms.

“Our secure, high performance, low power consumption nRF52 Series and newly released nRF53 Series SoCs have made Nordic a leader in the supply of short-range wireless technology for the smart home and related applications such as asset tracking,” says Kjetil Holstad, Director of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor. “Now, by cooperating with both Amazon Sidewalk and ACS, we will be able to help our customers build smart home products that will bring even greater convenience, flexibility and safety to consumers.”

Nordic’s nRF52840 System-on-Chip (SoC) is Bluetooth 5-, Thread 1.1-, and Zigbee PRO (R21) and Green Power proxy specification-certified and its Dynamic Multiprotocol feature uniquely supports concurrent wireless connectivity of the protocols in smart home applications. The SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with floating point unit (FPU) and a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio, 1MB Flash memory and 256kB RAM. The SoC incorporates an Arm CryptoCell™-310 cryptographic accelerator and is supplied with Nordic’s S140 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5-certified software protocol stack for building long range and high data Bluetooth LE applications. OpenThread and Zigbee stacks are available through Nordic’s nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee.

The Nordic nRF5340 SoC is based around dual Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors; a high performance application processor running up to 128 MHz (510 CoreMark) with dedicated 1 MB Flash and 512 KB RAM, and a fully programmable, ultra low power network processor running at 64 MHz (238 CoreMark) with dedicated 256 KB Flash and 64 KB RAM. The SoC features enhanced dynamic multiprotocol support enabling concurrent Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth mesh/Thread/Zigbee operation for provisioning/commissioning and interaction with a mesh network. It incorporates Arm CryptoCell-312, Arm TrustZone® technology, and Secure Key Storage for the highest level of security. The nRF5340’s nRF Connect SDK integrates the Zephyr RTOS, a Bluetooth LE protocol stack, application examples, and hardware drivers.

*Source: DNB Markets