ALMA-B10x versions are built around Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF54H20 wireless microcontrollers and have dual 320MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores, dual 320MHz RISC-V cores, plus 2Mbyte of non-volatile memory and 1Mbyte ram. They also support NFC-A.
NORA-B20x versions have Nordic’s nRF54L15 chip with a single 128MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core that scores 505CoreMark said u-blox. They have direction finding support for indoor positioning, and also support Zigbee.
“ALMA-B1 is a high-end wireless MCU, while NORA-B2 brings ultra-low power to less complex applications,” according to u-blox. “In the indoor positioning example, ALMA-B1 could act as an anchor point due to its vast processing capabilities, while the power efficiency of NORA-B2 makes it suitable for asset tracking tags – ALMA-B1 can even replace general-purpose MCUs.”
That said, only a single consumption figure is available at all so far, and that is 2mA for ALMA in receive-only mode. Power rails are 1.7 – 5.5V for ALMA and 1.71 – 3.6V for NORA. Temperature ranges are -40 to +105°C and -40 to +85°C respectively.
Both come in a 10.4 x 11.2 x 1.9mm Bxx1 version that needs an external antenna, and a 10.4 x 14.3 x 1.9mm Bxx6 version with an on-board antenna (pictured).
The ALMA Bluetooth radios are rated at 13dBm with an estimate of 1,400m range, the NORA radios for 10dBm with range to be determined. ALMA versions list CAN-FD among their interfaces.
Protection features for all include: secure boot, secure storage, secure debug interface, hardware crypto accelerators, physical tamper detection and side-channel defense.
These are not available yet – samples are scheduled for Q3 this year.
Find ALMA-B10x on this web page and NORA-B20x here
