SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP295: How Nordic Semiconductor Enables World-Class Wireless Products with Sam Presley

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Dan is joined by Sam Presley, technical product manager at Nordic Semiconductor. With a background in electronics engineering, embedded firmware development and consumer products development, his current areas of expertise are hardware and software for IoT applications, with a special focus on enabling product manufacturers… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nennie, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Sam Presley, technical product manager at Nordic Semiconductor. With a background in electronics engineering, embedded firmware development and consumer products development, his current area of expertise are hardware and software for IoT applications, with a special focus on enabling product manufacturers to build the next generation of secure, connected products. And Sam has been instrumental in the launch of Nordic's latest SOCs. Welcome to the podcast Sam. Hi Daniel, great to be here today. So first, can you tell us a bit about yourself Sam and what do you enjoy most

about working for Nordic? Yeah so I'm an electronics engineer so I'm currently working as a technical product manager at Nordic. This means I'm focused on our solutions in 2.4 GHzhertz, so in Bluetooth low energy, matter, thread, and big B. I've previously worked in the development of M products at companies such as Dyson. And really, for me, the most exciting part of this job is seeing how our customers take our technology to create truly best-in-class, battery-powered wireless products across a really wide range of industries and application areas.

Great. So let's talk about a specific product. What is NRF54L15? What does it do? Yeah, so our NRF54L series is really taking our highly popular NRF52 series to the next level. So the NRF52 series, if your listeners are not aware, is Nordic's most successful product previously, and has now been deployed across thousands of customer designs.

So with the NRF54L15, it's a wireless microcontroller. This means that we integrate an ultra-low power 2.4 gigahertz radio, which is really Nordic's expertise, together with MCU functionality, all into a single SoC. So, it has a 128 megahertz ARM Cortex-M33 processor. This is double the processing power and triple the processing efficiency compared to our previous NRF52 series. Of course, it integrates all of the standard referrals and interfaces you would normally get in MCU. We also integrate a new RISC-V coprocessor, which is new to the NRF64L series, and can be used to solve timing critical

challenges which often are incurred in these kinds of products. In the series, we are now giving access to three devices, the NRF64L15, NRF64L10, and the NRF64L05. This means we have a selection of memory size options available, enabling the series to cover a wide range of application areas. That's right, the whole NRF54 series we've designed for applications that demand a really high level of processing power together with energy efficiency and security, which we all know is important. Right. So how does the NRF54L bring increased processing power and efficiency to Bluetooth LE? Can you provide us a little bit more information on that?

Yeah, of course. So at Nordic we see a growing demand from our customers, both lower power consumption as well as higher processing capability. This is because customers want to see more of the same size batteries and in many cases reduce battery size. So a key enabler of this is our expertise in delivering ultra-low power solutions. So Nordic has a huge wide range of proprietary technology and IP which we've developed and

innovated since we were founded around 40 years ago. This includes our radio technology as well as oscillators and proprietary SRAM technology which we integrate into all of our devices. So throughout our devices we design and optimize these for ultra-low power operation and performance. Of course, in addition to the hardware, the software also needs to be designed for ultra-low power. This is somewhere where we spend a lot of effort in optimizing our wireless protocol stacks.

Also, with the NR54 series, we embarked on a major technology development program to move our designs in some modern 22 nanometer process nodes and it's so these process nodes which are enabling us to increase our crop speeds, increase memory densities all while continuing to optimize our designs for low power consumption. So what makes this series the ideal solution for IoT, smart home, healthcare and industrial applications? Yeah so our solutions are enabling ultra-low products across all of these areas. Some key standard areas really are in healthcare, we are present in things like continuous glucose monitors,

in industrial you can see us in many building automation solutions. In the smart home, we have a really great adoption and presence within the matter ecosystem, which is really interesting in growing new technology. So in Nordic, we really focus on providing complete solution. The aim here is to have our customers get their products to market in the shortest of time. So the hardware is a major part, but in fact, the software is of equal importance, equal importance in terms of the time and effort that we see our customers spending in this

area. So we, on the software side, support all leading wireless standard technologies. So, we've been a leader in Bluetooth learning for over a decade. Now we have a strong position also in other technology areas such as matter and thread as well as Zigbee, which means our customers can come to us and get the technology that they need to create the products that they have on their robot, all from a single provider. Our SDK, which we call the NRF Connect SDK, is a unified and scalable embedded SDK for

developing applications across all of our product series. This means that our customers can use a single platform, a single software platform to develop products whether using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or cellular. I already mentioned our presence within the matter ecosystem. This is somewhere where we spend a lot of effort in terms of investing in the ecosystem of technologies which enable our customers to build products. Other examples here are Amazon Sidewalk, Find My, and Google Find My Device. These are all technologies we support.

And also beyond the wireless connectivity solutions, we at Nordic provide a number of other complementary products, such as our power management devices. These P-Mix enable our customers to very accurately understand the power that's remaining in their batteries, These P-Mix enable our customers to very accurately understand the power that's remaining in their batteries, as well as charge these batteries. What we aim to do really is maximize the efficiency

all the way for our customers' designs from the battery to the antenna in these ultra-low power wireless systems. Great. So what do you think the future holds for ultra low power SoCs? Yeah, interesting question. So, I mean, ultimately, the demands for lower power consumption and high compute capability are only going to continue as we see product makers continue to innovate to create the best products for their customers. And of course undoubtedly we can expect to see more and more products integrating technology such as machine learning

inferencing within edge devices in the years to come with the rise of AI across all aspects of our lives. And final question Sam, how do customers normally engage with Nordic, where can they find out more information? Yeah, absolutely. So first off, I'd recommend you check out our website, nordicsemmy.com. There you can learn more about our devices

and capabilities. And if you're looking to get started with our products and actually maybe potentially use our products in a prototype or in a product you're planning, I really recommend you check out our Nordic Dev Academy. This is an online learning platform which provides free hands-on learning courses for Bluetooth LRNG as well as all of the other technologies within the Nordic portfolio including Wi-Fi and cellular. And this gets you from not having used Nordic products before to having your demos up and running.

And of course, to do those courses, you will likely want to have a development kits to follow along on the practical exercises. And the development kits for devices, including the NRF-54-L15 are available from all of the major distributors. So you should have no problem getting your hands on one. Great.

Hey, thank you for your time, Sam. Thank you, Daniel. It was really great to talk to you today. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening, and have a great day.