Product overview

The S130 SoftDevice is a precompiled and linked binary image implementing a Bluetooth^® 4.2 low energy protocol stack for the nRF51 Series of SoCs.

See the nRF51 Series Compatibility Matrix for SoftDevice/IC compatibility information.

Figure 1 is a block diagram of the nRF51 series software architecture. It includes the standard ARM^® CMSIS interface for nRF51 hardware, a master boot record, profile and application code, application specific peripheral drivers, and a firmware module identified as a SoftDevice.

A SoftDevice consists of three main components:

• SoC Library - Implementation and nRF API for shared hardware resource management (application coexistence).
• SoftDevice Manager - Implementation and nRF API for SoftDevice management (enabling/disabling the SoftDevice, etc.).
• Bluetooth 4.2 low energy protocol stack - Implementation of protocol stack and API.

The Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of standard C language functions and data types, provided as a series of header files, that give the application complete compiler and linker independence from the SoftDevice implementation. See Application Programming Interface (API) for more details.

The SoftDevice enables the application developer to develop their code as a standard ARM Cortex^® -M0 project without having the need to integrate with proprietary IC vendor software frameworks. This means that any ARM Cortex -M0-compatible toolchain can be used to develop Bluetooth low energy applications with the SoftDevice.

The SoftDevice can be programmed onto compatible nRF51 Series ICs during both development and production.