Low power SoC

Nordic Semiconductor has launched what it claims is the world’s smallest and most highly integrated single chip 2.4 GHz ultra-low power wireless system-on-chip — the nRF24LE1.

It integrates a transceiver core (the nRF24L01+) and a mixed signal 8-bit microcontroller with flash memory into a single chip for ULP wireless applications and is suitable for the ULP wireless market because it can run both RF protocol stack and application layer on a single chip.

It delivers true ULP operation with peak currents low enough to run on coin cell batteries.

The device also integrates an enhanced 8051 mixed signal MCU core featuring fewer clock cycles per instrucion than legacy 8051 devices. This high performance, combined with 16 KB of on-chip flash plus 1 KB of SRAM, ensures the processing platform is powerful enough to run both the RF protocol stack and application layer.

A wide range of peripherals and power-saving modes supports the RF protocol stack. A ULP 32 kHz crystal oscillator provides high accuracy timing for low report rate synchronous protocols and a 16 MHz RC oscillator provides fast start-up times from idle.

The oscillator can provide timing accurate enough for higher report rate protocols without requiring an external crystal. A security co-processor supports AES encrypted wireless communication.

The device provides a range of nanoamp and microamp idle modes specifically designed for ULP RF protocol stacks.

For the application layer the nRF24LEI offers a set of interfaces and peripherals including an SPI, 2-wire, UART, 12-bit ADC, PWM and an analog comparator.