Mouser Electronics, Inc., the industry's leading New Product Introduction (NPI) distributor with the widest selection of semiconductors and electronic components, is now stocking the nRF52840 Preview Development Kit (nRF52840-PDK) from Nordic Semiconductor. The nRF52840-PDK is a versatile single board development kit for evaluating the nRF52840 system-on-chip (SoC), a proprietary wireless connectivity solution that supports several protocols, including the recently released Bluetooth® 5 specification. Bluetooth 5 introduces longer range and throughput improvements that significantly enhance Bluetooth wireless technology’s suitability for smart home, wearables, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The Nordic nRF52840 Preview Development Kit, available from Mouser Electronics, enables developers to evaluate wireless connectivity designs based on the onboard nRF52840 SoC. The kit includes four user-programmable buttons and LEDs, is hardware compatible with the Arduino Uno R3-based shields, and features connector pins for all inputs and outputs (I/O) and interfaces, including a dedicated connector for the included external NFC antenna.

The nRF52840 SoC builds on the architecture of Nordic Semiconductor’s existing nRF52 Series of SoCs to support complex Bluetooth low energy and other low-power wireless applications. The nRF52840 SoC employs a 64MHz, 32-bit ARM^® Cortex^®-M4F processor employed on Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC, plus a CPU with ample generic processing power, floating point, and digital signal processor (DSP) performance.

The nRF52840-PDK complies with the Bluetooth 5 specification, which, coupled with increased maximum output power, enables the nRF52840 SoC to deliver Bluetooth low energy wireless connectivity with up to four times the range or up to twice the raw data bandwidth (2 Mbps) compared with the Bluetooth low energy implementation of Bluetooth 4.2. In addition to Bluetooth 5 support, the nRF52840 SoC includes IEEE 802.15.4 capabilities for ZigBee® and Thread-based smart home technologies or as a Network Adaptation Layer with 6LoWPAN and standard internet protocols. The nRF52840 SoC’s support for 802.15.4 significantly extends its capability as an interoperable foundation technology for IoT, smart home, or industrial sensor wireless networks using several different wireless technologies.

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