 Welcome to the Nordic booth. We're at Embedded World 2020. My name is Björn Kvåle. I'm a product marketing engineer at Nordic Semiconductor. If we move over here, you can see this is our new flagship NRF 5340 SoC. It's running two Cortex ARM M33 processors, one at 128 MHz and one at 64 MHz. Why the two different frequencies? So one of them is mainly for higher performance and then the other one is mainly for better efficiency. And also one of the processors we mainly use for the application and the other processors are mainly for networking too. That's for current consumption. Here you can actually see the 5340 development kit. And this is the SoC right over here. And how do people develop different things with this? Is it a standard way of doing stuff around the Nordic? Or is something specific that's special about this one? We are using NRF Connect SDK, which is based on the Zephyr real-time operating system. So that's the main SDK we use for programming. You're contributing a lot to Zephyr, right? There's Intel number one and you're like right there number two. That's what I saw on the pie chart. That could be, that could be. We're high up there for sure. You're excited about the Zephyr? Yeah. And it's working great with your solutions? We're very happy so far. You're very big in the BLE, right? We are. When you look at Bluetooth, it's kind of like Nordic is the biggest one? Nordic is the biggest. We have 40 to 50 percent market share consistently worldwide in the BLE market. Nice. And here are some examples of different products that are using the solutions that we have. So this is actually a thread smart clothes hanger. So I think this is actually done in a store. So you can actually, if you have a dress or some kind of clothes article on this smart hanger, there's a touch screen on here and then you can choose the size that you want to try. And then someone will come out and bring the size to you. Wow. Cool. There's also something happening on flexible? Yeah. This is a flexible BLE IC using our product using our SOC. But your BLE is not flexible, right? Maybe. No. They put it on. That's a good question. They put it on here somehow. That's a very good question. Sphero and basketball. Yeah. There's like thousands of products. There are for sure. So here the basketball is quite cool. I think you have a bunch of different statistics that you can use to improve your basketball performance. Stuff for dogs. All kinds of stuff. Here we have a tracker from Telesport for sheep. That's in Norway. So that farmers don't lose track of their sheep. So you use Bluetooth for sheep? This is then using the NRF 9160. So this is LTM or narrowband IoT. So we have expanded before we focused mainly on Bluetooth live energy. But now we're also expanding into long range LTM one. So this kind of started last year to do these? Yeah. Before you were just doing the stuff? Before we were mainly doing this. And then we expanded with the GPS, narrowband and LTM one. This means your smart devices have no limit in range anymore, right? With this kind of technology you can go very far. You can go 15 kilometers roughly, max. Depending on where the base station is. But of course you have multiple base stations around and then you are in effect. You have a long range for sure. So maybe do you show some of the list of some of the partners that are doing different boards? Let's go right over here. I don't know, take me? Yeah. Okay, so here you can see some of our different module makers. So you can see we have NRF 5340 on this one. NRF 52840 SOC in this one. 52833. So that means this one right up there. So small. So that means this one right up there. So small. It has dual Cortex M33. And this one has single. Single Cortex ARM M4F. M4F? With floating foot. That means high performance? Yeah. And for example a company like U-Blocks is just using their chip all over the place and doing a whole bunch of stuff. How does it work for them to do partnership with Nordic? What do you provide a lot of support to them and back and forward and make things happen? Yeah, so I think that's the main way we start and then they can talk, module makers can talk to one of our sales managers and then they can get the conversation started. Which one is most popular? Maybe you cannot say. I'd say well you can see the 52832. There's definitely multiple modules here. It has good performance and also a good price. This is a Cortex M4F too. M4F. Lots of different and maybe also shipping and watches quantities of these. Which one is your most popular part? That's a good question. It's hard to say. I'd say the 52832 is most likely the most popular. And here's some stuff with the... Yeah, so this is actually showcasing the NRF 5340. So this is actually showing a DOOM demo. So we can see here. Here we can see this is a BBC micro bit running on the NRF 51 and we're using a wireless protocol then and we're actually running the DOOM demo on... So we're running the demo on the application processor on the SOC there and all of the data is stored on the QSBI down here in between the SOC and the buttons. And then we have a high speed SBI connection to this 320x240 pixel display which is very similar to what a lot of wearables are actually using. So this is a great SOC for wearable applications. Is running DOOM smoothly? Yeah, you can see. I mean, this is pretty smooth I would say. Very low latency. Very low lag. But it doesn't run crisis. Right now we're only running DOOM. That's one of those things people are chatting about. DOOM has an open source port so I think that's the main reason why we're using DOOM. Nice. So this is really showing off the performance. The M33 is kind of like Cortex M3, M4 kind of performance or... Higher performance. Higher than those. Lower than M7, right? Yeah. So that's going to open up a bunch of new opportunities. For sure. Especially complex opportunities. If you require a lot of cryptography, etc. A lot of processing power such as DOOM, for example. That's perfect. Do you show on this graph something about the new things? Yes, here you can see the application processor, network processor. The main idea is that you can run your application on here and then you run the networking side of things on here. So in this demo here, we are running DOOM on the application processor and then on the network processor we're running the PLE communication. So big launch, kind of like now. This is for the embedded world launch. So how soon is devices coming with these? How long does it take? Because you have the dev kits now. Dev kits are out now. Dev boards. Yeah. So it takes six months or something like that? It depends how I guess most customers take one to two years to develop. But I can't really say too much about production readiness. And one of the big deals of the Cortex M33 is about the security, right? There's like new things in there that are doing hardware security. Yeah. So you have the ARM trust zone for once, which sets up secure and non-secure parts of flash, RAM and peripherals. And that then implements the root of trust. You also have a key management unit. You have a crypto cell for hardware acceleration and also the SPU too. So there are, yeah, a big focus on security on this SOC. Nice. Even though it's a little bit of a strange and better world, what's the reception so far about this one? You can see there are a lot of people here. Your booth is always busy. It doesn't matter what's happening all the time. And we do notice there is a lot of people are interested in, especially in the 5340 demo. What's some of the other demos you have around here? So here we have a thread house. You can take a quick look at that. I'll move over to the other side. Quick one? Yeah. So this thread demo, here we can see I have a remote here, as you can see here. And here we have a set of commands. So I can turn on and off the TV over there at the back there. You can see the TV turns on and off. We have a fan up there. Then you also have a light which you can turn on and off. We have a door lock right here. So I can either lock the door, unlock the door. And then I can also open the door, close the door. And we also have an alarm. So if I turn on this alarm, save one more try. Now the alarm's on. And then it should make, let's see quickly. So the alarm is armed. Now you can see it makes some noise. One other thing is here is we're running a co-app over UDTP. So we have a gateway. And this is then connecting to the things IO, which is a website where you can see more info on the status of the home itself. So as you can see, we can see the alarm status, armed or not armed. You can also see door control, et cetera. We can also ring the doorbell, for example. And then you can actually see we got a new event. It's 253, so this is the event we just got. Right now I can press it one more time. So you can see we got an event right now, doorbell rings. So yeah, and this is all running thread, IP protocol. And it's a great demo to show the capabilities of the thread protocol. The thread protocol is, how is the adoption of that? How big is it? A lot of people are using thread. I think quite a lot of people are using thread, yeah. Especially for smart home applications, it's quite good. It uses routing, so it is quite a quick protocol when it comes to mesh. And reliable. You don't want some... It's very reliable, too, exactly. So you do have multiple paths to the end target, so if one node were to fall out for a reason. And here at the reception area, what are you greeting people with around here? So here you can see all of our different products that we have. We have Nordic thingy52, rapid prototyping platform with different sensors, et cetera, for BLE right over there. You have the BBC micro bit, which we had in the Doom demo that I showed previously. It's running in NRF 51. How's the micro bit going? Lots of schools are using them. Yeah, a lot of schools. I don't have any numbers for you, but I know it is quite a popular... In Norway? Yeah, we just got a shipment of micro bits a few weeks back. So all the children in Norway, they're all using it? Or just some? Maybe not all, but definitely some. UK is probably a lot. Yep, UK a lot too. Moving on, we have the Power Profiler Kit. So this is a great tool for actually measuring the current of Bluetooth low energy applications and to see whether you are able to get the current that you need to get the battery lifetime that you require. Here you have the 52,840 dongle, which uses our 52,840 SoC. It's a very low cost dongle. It can be used for sniffing applications. For example, if you want to take a sniffer trace between two Bluetooth low energy connections, that's a great tool for that. This is probably our most popular development kit. This is the NR52 development kit running with the 52,832 SoC. Back here we have a 52,833 development kit. It's running Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding. So you are able to run direction finding AOA on that kit. And then back here we have the 53,440 development kit. No, sorry, the 52,840 there. And then we have the NRF 90,160 development kit over there. So all of these development kits that we saw there were all Bluetooth and then these two here, the NRF 90,160 development kit and the Thingy 91 development or the Thingy 91 prototyping port are running LTM1 or narrow band IoT long range communication. NB IoT is catching up. Is it getting a lot of traction? How is the market? I think it's getting quite a lot of traction. I guess one of the key differentiators between narrow band and LTM1 is that narrow band does have a bit more range. It has less bandwidth so it is able to get more range. Also better penetration through the ground. We have noticed some customers I think they have a few meters of concrete and they have a device underneath that concrete in a basement somewhere and they are still able to get a connection to the base station. I'd say the main difference between narrow band and LTM1 is that if you want mobility, for example, roaming applications, etc. a bit more higher throughput than LTM1 is. Is NB IoT lower in the power consumption also? Is it cheaper to use in terms of carrier deployments and stuff like that or not quite easy to define? That depends a lot on the application I think. Especially if you have higher throughput so if you have more data to send LTM1 is probably the better bet because you are able to send the data quicker and then sleep for longer amounts of time. There is a little bit more over here. How would you say you set 40-50% of the BLE market? How did you do that? Why are there so many people working with Nordic? That's a company called DNB. It's a bank in Norway and they have the Bluetooth SIG. You have all of the... Every device that... Every Bluetooth energy device has a listing. So from that you are able to sort of estimate. How did Nordic become so successful? How did Nordic... Is it just better and faster and lower power and better price? We do have very low power consumption. That's a part of our DNA and it's also a very usable solution. So we do have 30 plus application engineers in our tech support group. So we do have a Nordic developer zone which the main idea is to try to help developers, customers get to market quicker. So I think it's a combination of very great hardware, also very great software. So we give a lot of our software away for free. And you also have the support then from our Nordic dev zone. And that then enables customers to come to market quickly. Let's check this demo right here. What's happening there? Okay, so this is a Zigbee demo. So here we have a Zigbee house. It's very similar to the Thread demo over here. And here you can see... You can turn on and off the different lights. You also have a door lock. I think we can... Is this on? Alexa. Unlock the door. Zero, zero, zero, zero. Unlocking. Nice. So you told Alexa the password. Yeah, that's cool. Exactly. So now you know the password too. Nice. So yeah, that's the main... That's Zigbee. It's very similar to Thread in many ways. I'd say the main difference is it uses a different routing technique than Thread. But it is, Zigbee's been around for quite a while. And as you can see, there is Alexa support. You have an IKEA light bulb support. Zigbee, yeah, it's here to stay for sure. Nice. And there's a couple more here. It's very busy. But maybe we can get to that one there. Let's get right here. It looks like the stuff happening with the small... Is it E-ink displays? Yeah. So this display here, you can actually see if you look on here. You can see this is Google Calendar. And we can basically give in different event dates. And then from that, this information then gets sent down to the NRF 9160 here. So this development kit here. And then it's sending BLE packets then to these different meeting rooms. And these meeting rooms are all using e-paper displays. So you can see right now, they're all vacant. But if I were to give in a new event at this time, you could then see that the e-paper display would get updated with the calendar event. All right. If we move on to this device, this is another demo that we're running on the NRF, the thingy91. So you can see we have an NRF 9160 SIP. We're running iBasis SIM cards, LTM1. And here you can actually see, if you zoom back out over here, you can see these are all of the devices that we actually have connected as of right now. So you can see here, this is actually one of the devices we actually have on at the moment. And you can see this, we are indoors. So there's no GPS signal right now. But we are able to get an approximate position via the base station. So that's how we get the location position. So it's NB IoT. I think this one is running, we have some running on LTM1. And then we have others running on narrow band IoT. What's the billing? How does it work? How do people pay for the service? Like telecoms have some kind of package. So the telecoms have some kind of package. And then depending on how much data you need, you pay varying on the data you need to use. Very similar to cell phones. You can say one gigabyte for one year and boom, that works. For example, you also get 10 megabytes free of charge when you either buy a thingy91 or a 91 development kit. You get a free iBase SIM card and that gives you then 10 megabytes free of charge. How many countries have this stuff implemented already? Are there some that need to catch up, that are not quite advanced in this yet? There are a few that I guess need to catch up. But most of the major countries already have either LTM1, narrow band or both supported. All right. So I think there's a bunch more, but it's busy right? Yeah. I'd say that's the... Yeah. Those are the main demos I'd say. Cool. So what's the next kind of event Nordic goes to? Next kind of event. We're at Lighten Building. I think that's in one or two weeks time. So we will be... Is that a cancelled show? Oh no, sorry. That has been cancelled. That's right. You were in Barcelona, right? That's cancelled. That's cancelled. We'll see. Let's see. A bunch of shows. You just go to all of them. We do have a Nordic tech tour that's starting in March 9th, actually. So that is basically where we present. We present for around six hours. We present our solutions and present in great technical detail what solutions we have to offer. On the web? No. No, so this is actually in person where we'll be at... I think it's 20, 30 different locations in EMEA. So Europe, Middle East, Africa. So yeah, we'll be presenting the NRF 9160, some of our Bluetooth products, and also the NRF Connect SDK, which is our new SDK for the NRF 53 series and also the NRF 91 series. And I guess you're part of all these groups that design the future of Bluetooth, the future of all these different things. Maybe there's some stuff happening in the future, right? Maybe there's new plans, Bluetooth 6 or, I don't know, something. You're probably involved. A bunch of stuff for the future, too. Yeah, sure. I'm not involved with that, so I can't really tell you too much. But we do have Bluetooth 5.2. Just came out a while back. Bluetooth Low Energy Audio. So I'd say that's the next big thing to come out regarding Bluetooth. And of course you also have Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding, that's quite big. If you want to talk to the CUPA guys afterwards, they're right here. They have a great, cool Direction Finding demo. All right. My name is Santo Puglia. I'm from KUPA. We're here at Nordic Booth. And we are here demonstrating CUPA's indoor positioning technology. These tags, which we are tracking with our locators up there, these are based on Nordic radios. And we are using Direction Finding to locate these tags on the fence. So what's inside here and up there? Basically these are all symbol BLE tags. But they operate on the Iran CUPA firmware. And we operate slightly different than normal tags. We are sort of on the edge channels of the BLE spectrum. So it means that it's more sort of free from other radio traffic that headsets and phones are using. And therefore the accuracy is getting better when we track the items. Here on the demo I have just a couple of these tags. Let me take all of them and start working around. You can see that they're changing the location. We're going here, coming back and putting them back here. So this is better than other BLE tracking? Let's put it so that it's less error prone. We can do up to 30 cm accuracy in the good environment. And even in complicated environments we can go up to 1 m accuracy with tracking. CUPA has been in this business since 2012. And the technology itself goes back to the Nokia times where the research group, Hansa Smart Research People has gone off the technology and started off the department. Is this in a lot of devices out there or is it not yet? Is it like a future thing? No, no. There have already been a lot of commercial deployments. We sell through the solution providers and system integrators globally. There are use cases that really have arrived from the... What's in there? These are the tax providers. These are the tax from our partner companies. They are all based on NR52 radio and they all are running CUPA's proprietary firmware. All use cases come with a little bit different requirements on tax saves and sizes. And therefore we are not the only one doing the tax. Rather the firmware license is out to tax partners who are then designing the tax that the use case needs. So the firmware is your secret sauce? I would say that the firmware is one piece of the secret sauce. The secret sauce is more how do we build the locator with multiple antennas and how the digital, let's say the analog signal is converted into the digital signal and then finally the algorithm that puts the blue dot in the end on the map. That's the secret sauce for us. Are you also working with the Nordic team in Finland? Yeah, we have been working with Nordic for almost, I would say almost is the beginning. Currently the development is mostly on the tax side of course, it's good to have good friends in this business so that we have good tools to work with. Are there a lot of tags out there in the world? Oh yeah, I cannot give you the definite numbers but I can say that BLE seems to be taking off as a platform as technology. And especially any kind of asset tracking use case that may not have been possible in the past is possible now because the accuracy, power efficiency and the cost of the tax and the total cost of ownership of the solution system itself. How long is the battery on one of these? Oh, the battery life again depends on the use case because usually the way it works is that if the tag is not moving we rather put it sort of on the hibernating sleep mode so to conserve the battery and making the radio in the first less, create less noise in the radio in the first. So that's quite important when the more tags you have in the deployment that you want to control how they are sort of tripping the thing. So it's like one month's battery life on this one? No, no, no, we are talking about years. Years? And with this accuracy and this speed, like what you're just doing right now when you're moving around? Sorry? Like this tag is going to be running for years. Yeah, it depends if I'm moving it all the time and if I'm not sort of letting it to sleep for a while it will run out faster but if I sort of leave it there, if it's a attached to item that is not moving regularly it can run for years. So, does it mean it has an accelerometer and it's going to turn off the battery power consumption? That's exactly right. Also, UP is also able to use some kind of smart zones that when asset is, for example, or tag is going out from the zone the system is able to tell the tag to do something else. For example, change the battery life when it's in the warehouse area or even, I don't know, the vibrate or put the lights on if it's outside the perimeter. Alright, so a lot of future for Bluetooth tracking for sure even though there's a range issue sometimes, right? You could say so, but I think so far it hasn't been that the range itself hasn't been really the limitation for us. What's the limitation? I think we have yet to see in a lot of use cases what future will bring. What's the price of one of those tags? We are talking about anything between the five euros up to 80 euros or even more, but that all depends on the sensors that you have on board the battery, the casing, the certification.