Bluetooth LE Audio powered by Nordic’s nRF53 Series

Bluetooth LE Audio powered by Nordic’s nRF53 Series

Nordic’s nRF53 Series is the third generation of Bluetooth® Low Energy System-on-chip (SoC) devices, building on the foundation of the nRF51 and nRF52 Series. With Bluetooth being by far the most recognized wireless standard for audio streaming, and emerging trends like LE Audio and Auracast™ the nRF53 Series by Nordic Semiconductor offers lots of possibilities for the future of wireless audio.

LE Audio is the next generation of Bluetooth Audio, making audio streaming over Bluetooth Low Energy possible. It enables new use cases and significantly reduces power consumption compared to Classic (BR/EDR) Audio. LE Audio will have a wider set of features, lower power consumption, and better perceived audio quality. The new Bluetooth LE Audio allows for more flexible processing of audio signals, elevating existing applications such as headphones and hearing aids, and creating new applications and markets for audio streaming. Read more about Bluetooth LE Audio here.

Nordic nRF5340 System-on-Chip (SoC)

The nRF5340 is the first ultra-low power wireless SoC with two Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors and a multiprotocol 2.4 GHz transceiver. The combination of two flexible processors, advanced security features and an operating temperature of up to 105°C, makes nRF5340 a great choice for a wide variety of applications. The nRF5340 supports an extensive range of wireless protocols, including Bluetooth® 5.1 Direction Finding, Bluetooth 5 Long Range, NFC, Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, and Zigbee. In addition, it also supports LE Audio.

nRF53 Series Development Kits

nRF5340 Audio Development Kit

The nRF5340 Audio Development Kit (DK) is the recommended platform for Bluetooth LE Audio products and contains everything needed to start development. The configurable kit can function as a USB dongle to send or receive audio data from a PC. Additionally, it can also function as a business headset, broadcast receiver or a True Wireless Stereo (TWS) Earbud. For most use-cases, we recommend using two or more DKs.

nRF5340 Development Kit

The nRF5340 DK is the development kit for the nRF5340 System-on-Chip (SoC). It provides everything needed to get started with development on a single board. The DK supports development with an extensive range of wireless protocols. It supports Bluetooth Low Energy with features such as high-throughput 2 Mbps, Advertising Extensions and Long Range. Mesh protocols like Bluetooth mesh, Thread and Zigbee can run concurrently with Bluetooth LE, enabling smartphones to provision, commission, configure and control mesh nodes. NFC, ANT, 802.15.4 and 2.4 GHz proprietary protocols are also supported.

Thingy:53

The Nordic Thingy:53™ is an easy-to-use IoT prototyping platform. It makes it possible to create prototypes and proofs-of-concept without building custom hardware. The Thingy:53 is built around the nRF5340 SoC which enables it to run embedded machine learning (ML) models directly on the device with the processing power and memory size of its Arm Cortex-M33 processors. The nRF Edge Impulse app enables users to connect their Nordic Thingy:53 to their Edge Impulse studio account through a mobile device. It allows them to wirelessly transfer sensor data over Bluetooth LE to the mobile device and upload it to the cloud for training and download trained ML models to the Thingy:53 for deployment and inferencing.