nRF7002 DK

Overview

The nRF7002 DK (PCA10143) is a single-board development kit for evaluation and development on the nRF7002, a Wi-Fi companion IC to Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF5340 System-on-Chip (SoC) host processor. It is certified for the Wi-Fi Alliance® Wi-Fi Certification program [1] in the Connectivity, Security, and Optimization categories. See UG Wi-Fi certification [2] for detailed information.

The nRF7002 is an IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) compliant solution that implements the Wi-Fi physical layer and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocols. It implements the nRF Wi-Fi driver software on the nRF5340 host processor communicating over the QSPI bus.

The nRF5340 host is a dual-core SoC based on the Arm® Cortex®-M33 architecture. It has the following features:

• A full-featured Arm Cortex-M33F core with DSP instructions, FPU, and Armv8-M Security Extension, running at up to 128 MHz, referred to as the application core.

• A secondary Arm Cortex-M33 core, with a reduced feature set, running at a fixed 64 MHz, referred to as the network core.

The nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp board target provides support for the application core on the nRF5340 SoC. The nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpunet board target provides support for the network core on the nRF5340 SoC.

nRF7002 DK (Credit: Nordic Semiconductor)

More information about the board can be found at the nRF7002 DK website [4]. The nRF7002 DK Product Specification [5] contains the processor’s information and the datasheet.

Hardware

• nRF7002 DK: The nRF7002 DK has two external oscillators.

  • The frequency of the slow clock is 32.768 kHz.

  • The frequency of the main clock is 32 MHz.

• Micro-USB 2.0 cable

Supported features

The nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
ADC	on-chip	adc
CLOCK	on-chip	clock_control
FLASH	on-chip	flash
GPIO	on-chip	gpio
I2C(M)	on-chip	i2c
MPU	on-chip	arch/arm
NVIC	on-chip	arch/arm
PWM	on-chip	pwm
RTC	on-chip	system clock
RTT	Segger	console
RADIO	nrf7002	Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)
QSPI	on-chip	qspi
SPI(M/S)	on-chip	spi
SPU	on-chip	system protection
UARTE	on-chip	serial
USB	on-chip	usb
WDT	on-chip	watchdog

The nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpunet board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
CLOCK	on-chip	clock_control
FLASH	on-chip	flash
GPIO	on-chip	gpio
I2C(M)	on-chip	i2c
MPU	on-chip	arch/arm
NVIC	on-chip	arch/arm
RADIO	on-chip	Bluetooth, ieee802154
RTC	on-chip	system clock
RTT	Segger	console
SPI(M/S)	on-chip	spi
UARTE	on-chip	serial
WDT	on-chip	watchdog

Other hardware features have not been enabled yet for this board. See nRF7002 DK Product Specification [5] for a complete list of nRF7002 DK board hardware features.

Connections and IOs

The connections and IOs supported by the development kit are listed in this section.

LED

• LED 1 (green) = P1.06

• LED 2 (green) = P1.07

Push buttons

• Button 1 = SW1 = P1.08

• Button 2 = SW2 = P1.09

• BOOT = SW5 = boot/reset

Wi-Fi control

• BUCKEN = P0.12

• IOVDD CONTROL = P0.31

• HOST IRQ = P0.23

• COEX_REQ = P0.28

• COEX_STATUS0 = P0.30

• COEX_STATUS1 = P0.29

• COEX_GRANT = P0.24

Security components

The following security components are available:

• Implementation Defined Attribution Unit (IDAU [3]) on the application core.

  The IDAU is implemented with the System Protection Unit and is used to define secure and non-secure memory maps. By default, the entire memory space (Flash, SRAM, and peripheral address space) is defined to be secure-accessible only.

• Secure boot.

Programming and Debugging

The nRF5340 application core supports the Armv8-M Security Extension. Applications built for the nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp board boot by default in the secure state.

The nRF5340 network core does not support the Armv8-M Security Extension. nRF5340 IDAU can configure bus accesses by the nRF5340 network core to have the secure attribute set. This allows to build and run secure-only applications on the nRF5340 SoC.

Building Secure/Non-Secure Zephyr applications with Arm® TrustZone®

Applications on the nRF5340 may contain a Secure and a Non-Secure firmware image for the application core. The Secure image can be built using either Zephyr or Trusted Firmware M [6] (TF-M). Non-Secure firmware images are always built using Zephyr. The two alternatives are described below.

Note

By default, SPE for the nRF5340 application core is built using TF-M.

Building the Secure firmware with TF-M

The process to build the Secure firmware image using TF-M and the Non-Secure firmware image using Zephyr requires the following steps:

1. Build the Non-Secure Zephyr application for the application core using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp/ns. To invoke the building of TF-M the Zephyr build system requires the Kconfig option BUILD_WITH_TFM to be enabled, which is done by default when building Zephyr as a Non-Secure application. The Zephyr build system will perform the following steps automatically:

   • Build the Non-Secure firmware image as a regular Zephyr application

   • Build a TF-M (secure) firmware image

   • Merge the output image binaries together

   • Optionally build a bootloader image (MCUboot)

Note

Depending on the TF-M configuration, an application DTS overlay may be required, to adjust the Non-Secure image Flash and SRAM starting address and sizes.

2. Build the application firmware for the network core using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpunet.

Building the Secure firmware using Zephyr

The process to build the Secure and the Non-Secure firmware images using Zephyr requires the following steps:

1. Build the Secure Zephyr application for the application core using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp and CONFIG_TRUSTED_EXECUTION_SECURE=y and CONFIG_BUILD_WITH_TFM=n in the application project configuration file.

2. Build the Non-Secure Zephyr application for the application core using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp/ns.

3. Merge the two binaries together.

4. Build the application firmware for the network core using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpunet.

When building a Secure/Non-Secure application for the nRF5340 application core, the Secure application will have to set the IDAU (SPU) configuration to allow Non-Secure access to all CPU resources utilized by the Non-Secure application firmware. SPU configuration shall take place before jumping to the Non-Secure application.

Building a Secure only application

Build the Zephyr app in the usual way (see Building an Application and Run an Application), using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp for the firmware running on the nRF5340 application core, and using -DBOARD=nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpunet for the firmware running on the nRF5340 network core.

Flashing

Follow the instructions in the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to install and configure all the necessary software. Further information can be found in Flashing. Then you can build and flash applications as usual (Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Warning

The nRF5340 has a flash read-back protection feature. When flash read-back protection is active, you will need to recover the chip before reflashing. If you are flashing with west, run this command for more details on the related --recover option:

west flash -H -r nrfjprog --skip-rebuild

Note

Flashing and debugging applications on the nRF5340 DK requires upgrading the nRF Command Line Tools to version 10.12.0. Further information on how to install the nRF Command Line Tools can be found in Flashing.

Here is an example for the Hello World application running on the nRF5340 application core.

First, run your favorite terminal program to listen for output.

$ minicom -D <tty_device> -b 115200

Replace <tty_device> with the port where the board nRF7002 DK can be found. For example, under Linux, /dev/ttyACM0.

Then build and flash the application in the usual way.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nrf7002dk/nrf5340/cpuapp samples/hello_world
west flash

Debugging

Refer to the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to learn about debugging Nordic boards with a Segger IC.

Next steps

You have now completed getting started with the nRF7002 DK. See the following links for where to go next:

• Installation [7] and Configuring and Building [8] documentation to install the nRF Connect SDK and learn more about its development environment.

• Developing with nRF70 [9] documentation for more advanced topics related to the nRF70 Series.

• Wi-Fi [10] documentation for information related to Wi-Fi protocol and Wi-Fi modes of operation.

References

[1]

https://www.wi-fi.org/certification

[2]

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-latest/page/nrf/protocols/wifi/wifi_certification.html#ug-wifi-certification

[3]

https://developer.arm.com/docs/100690/latest/attribution-units-sau-and-idau

[4]

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-hardware/nrf7002-dk

[5] (1,2)

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ps_nrf5340/page/keyfeatures_html5.html

[6]

https://www.trustedfirmware.org/projects/tf-m/

[7]

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-latest/page/nrf/installation.html#installation

[8]

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-latest/page/nrf/app_dev/config_and_build/index.html#configuration-and-build

[9]

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-latest/page/nrf/app_dev/device_guides/nrf70/index.html#ug-nrf70-developing

[10]

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-latest/page/nrf/protocols/wifi/index.html#ug-wifi