nRF5340 - World’s First Wireless SoC with Two Arm® Cortex®-M33 Processors from Nordic Semiconductor

Dual-core Bluetooth 5.3 SoC supporting Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth mesh, NFC, Thread and Zigbee

The nRF5340 is the world's first wireless System-on-Chip (SoC) with two Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors. The combination of two flexible processors, the advanced feature set, and an operating temperature up to 105 °C, makes it the ideal choice for LE audio, professional lighting, advanced wearables, and other complex IoT applications.

The nRF5340 is an all-in-one SoC, including a superset of the most prominent nRF52® Series features. Features like USB, Bluetooth 5.3, up to 105 °C operating temperature, and more, are combined with more performance, memory, integration, while minimizing current consumption.

The application processor is optimized for performance and can be clocked at either 128 or 64 MHz, using voltage-frequency scaling. The highest performance (514 CoreMark) is achieved with 128 MHz, while running at 64 MHz offers a more efficient option (73 CoreMark/mA). The application processor has 1 MB Flash, 512 KB RAM, a floating-point unit (FPU), an 8 KB 2-way associative cache and DSP instruction capabilities.

The network processor is clocked at 64 MHz and is optimized for low power and efficiency (101 CoreMark/mA). It has 256 KB Flash and 64 KB RAM. It is fully programmable, enabling the developer to select which parts of the code to run with the highest efficiency, in addition to the wireless protocol stack.

The nRF5340 takes security to the next level by incorporating Arm Crypto­Cell-312, Arm TrustZone®, and Secure Key Storage. Arm TrustZone efficiently provides system-wide hardware isolation for trusted software by separating between secure and non-secure regions on a single core. The security attrib­utes of the Flash, RAM, and peripherals are easily configured through the nRF Connect SDK. The Arm CryptoCell-312 hardware accelerates the strong ciphers and encryption standards required in the most security-conscious IoT products.

Secure Key Storage is enabled by the Key Management Unit (KMU) peripheral, where the keys are physically isolated from processor access, and only the Arm CryptoCell-312 can access the secure keys. The secure bootloader in the nRF Connect SDK establishes a root-of-trust and extends this to a chain-of-trust by only booting software that has a verified signature. The bootloader also verifies that all incoming device firmware updates originate from an authenticated source.

Designed for LE Audio

The SoC has been designed to meet the requirements of LE Audio, enabling audio streaming over Bluetooth Low Energy. LE Audio supports multi-stream synchronized audio for applications such as earbuds, and Audio Sharing, whereby a single audio source can broadcast to multiple recipients. The nRF5340 radio supports Isochronous Channels, the Bluetooth 5.2 feature required by LE Audio for streaming. LE Audio also introduces the Low Complexity Communications Codec (LC3), a high-quality, low-power audio compression codec that can run efficiently on the nRF5340. The audio data can be transferred to other parts of the system (AD/DA converters, speakers, microphones) using the I²S and PDM au­dio interfaces, which employ the nRF5340's low-jitter audio PLL clock source.

Ultra-low-power radio with great sensitivity

The nRF5340 SoC radio sets a new standard when it comes to combining advanced features and minimizing current. The 0 dBm TX current is 3.4 mA, while the RX current is only 2.7 mA, resulting in a reduction of 29% and 41% when compar­ing to the nRF52840 SoC. The RX sensitivity is -98 dBm, 3 dB better than nRF52840, meaning that the nRF5340 provides 3 dB better sensitivity, while using 41% less current.