Tianbo Education's "Elf in Hand" smart card uses Nordic low-power Bluetooth SOC

Nordic Semiconductor has announced that Guangdong Telpo Education Technology Co., Ltd. (TelpoEdu), a Guangdong-based developer of smart campus hardware, has chosen Nordic’s nRF52810 Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) to provide wireless connectivity for its “Elf in Hand” smart card, which supports the Alipay payment platform developed by e-commerce giant Alibaba and provides advanced payment and access control applications for students and the elderly.

The "Elf in Hand" smart card has both low-power Bluetooth and 2.4GHz proprietary wireless connectivity. Nordic SoC provides low-power Bluetooth connectivity, allowing students to pair the smart card with their Bluetooth 4.0 (and higher) smartphones and configure the smart card for Alipay's dynamic offline payment platform through the Tianbo app. Once the smart card is linked to the user's Alipay account, retailers can scan the QR code or barcode on the card to automatically deduct the amount from the student's account. The multi-protocol nRF52810 SoC also supports concurrent 2.4GHz proprietary wireless connectivity and is used with Tianbo Information's access control system to use the smart card as a building access card for schools and university campuses. 2.4GHz proprietary access control technology has been widely used on campus.

The smart card is powered by a CR2032 coin cell battery, which provides long battery life between battery changes, thanks in part to the low power consumption of the Nordic SoC. Designed to minimize power consumption, the nRF52810 SoC features features such as 4.6mA peak RX/TX current for the 2.4GHz radio, and a fully automatic power management system that reduces power consumption to 80% less than Nordic nRF51 Series SoCs.

The Nordic nRF52810 multiprotocol SoC combines a 64MHz 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software) with 192kB Flash and 24kB RAM, as well as advanced 128-bit AES encryption. The nRF52810 SoC comes with the latest version of Nordic S112, the Bluetooth 5 compliant RF protocol software.

“We chose to use the nRF52810 SoC because of its security features, the stability of the Nordic Bluetooth LE stack, and support for concurrent Bluetooth LE and 2.4GHz proprietary connections, which is critical for smart cards that are used as both payment solutions and access control cards,” said Yan Bin, project director at Guangdong Tianbo Education Technology, a subsidiary of Guangdong Tianbo Information Technology Co., Ltd. “The Nordic chip we used previously, as well as the Nordic software development kit [SDK], helped us cut development costs.”