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Electronics news

Stefano Viola's NiCE5340 SoM chip pushes the boundaries of miniaturization

Electronics engineer Stefano Viola has developed a system-on-module (SoM) called NiCE5340 that combines a Bluetooth SoC, FPGA and a wide array of sensors.

The 16x29mm board is driven by Nordic Semiconductor's nRF5340 and Lattice Semiconductor's iCE40 Ultra Plus integrated circuits. The nRF53 SoC includes two Arm Cortex-M33 processors and a radio receiver with support for various protocols. Additionally, the board has an nPM1100 chip for power management and battery charging.

The NiCE5340 also contains 10 different sensors, including an IMU, biosignal conversion unit, magnetometer, SAR sensor, PDM MEMS microphone, humidity/temperature sensor, tactile driver, RGB IR color sensor, barometric pressure sensor, and charge/discharge current measurement sensor. Stefano recognizes that not all sensors can find practical applications at the same time. However, the NiCE5340 platform has broad potential in a variety of applications, including environmental monitoring and health tracking.

The engineer used open-source tools to program the board, and provided over-the-air (OTA) programming of the nRF53 SoC and iCE40 FPGA. The back side of the PCB has land-grid-array (LGA) style pads, as well as a carrier board for mounting the NiCE5340. A flat ribbon cable connector can also support an NFC antenna.