Overview

The nRF52820 is a System-on-Chip (SoC) offering USB and advanced wireless connectivity in a small package, for HID, smart home, commercial, and industrial applications.

The nRF52820 features an Arm Cortex-M4 processor, clocked at 64 MHz. It has 256 KB Flash and 32 KB RAM, and a range of analog and digital interfaces such as an analog comparator, UART, SPI, TWI, QDEC, and last but not least, USB. It can be supplied with a voltage from 1.7 to 5.5 V which enables powering the device from sources such as rechargeable batteries or via USB. The 2.4 GHz multiprotocol radio is fully featured and provides up to +8 dBm output power.

nRF52820 supports all Bluetooth Low Energy features, including Direction Finding, high-throughput 2 Mbps, Long Range, and all Bluetooth 5.2 features. It also supports Bluetooth mesh, Thread and Zigbee mesh protocols. 

The nRF52820’s USB peripheral implements a Full Speed USB 2.0 device that offers a widely-used interface that enables low-latency and high-bandwidth communication with a range of hosts, such as PCs, tablets, smartphones, and gateways. It also adds the option of performing device firmware updates (DFU) over USB. When connected to a USB host, the nRF52820 can be directly powered by the always-present 5 V VBUS signal, and a reference layout for this configuration is provided under the Downloads tab.

The nRF52820 is supported by three Bluetooth LE protocol stacks, SoftDevice S112, S122 and S140. SoftDevice S122 is a new memory-optimized central stack, released as an alpha for the nRF52820. A guide on how to use nRF52820 with nRF5 SDK v16.0.0 is available here, while full nRF5 SDK support is coming in Q2 2020. The nRF52833 DK is the recommended development kit, it emulates the nRF52820, and can be used as a starting point for development before moving over to a custom board.