NXP RD-RW612-BGA

Overview

The RW612 is a highly integrated, low-power tri-radio wireless MCU with an integrated 260 MHz ARM Cortex-M33 MCU and Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) 5.3 / 802.15.4 radios designed for a broad array of applications, including connected smart home devices, gaming controllers, enterprise and industrial automation, smart accessories and smart energy.

The RW612 MCU subsystem includes 1.2 MB of on-chip SRAM and a high-bandwidth Quad SPI interface with an on-the-fly decryption engine for securely accessing off-chip XIP flash.

The advanced design of the RW612 delivers tight integration, low power and highly secure operation in a space- and cost-efficient wireless MCU requiring only a single 3.3 V power supply.

Hardware

  • 260 MHz ARM Cortex-M33, tri-radio cores for Wifi 6 + BLE 5.3 + 802.15.4

  • 1.2 MB on-chip SRAM

Supported Features

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

SYSTICK

on-chip

systick

MCI_IOMUX

on-chip

pinmux

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

USART

on-chip

serial

DMA

on-chip

dma

SPI

on-chip

spi

I2C

on-chip

i2c

FLEXSPI

on-chip

flash/memc

TRNG

on-chip

entropy

DMIC

on-chip

dmic

LCDIC

on-chip

mipi-dbi

WWDT

on-chip

watchdog

USBOTG

on-chip

usb

CTIMER

on-chip

counter

MRT

on-chip

counter

OS_TIMER

on-chip

os timer

PM

on-chip

power management; uses SoC Power Modes 1 and 2

BLE

on-chip

Bluetooth

The default configuration can be found in the defconfig file:

Other hardware features are not currently supported

Fetch Binary Blobs

To support Bluetooth, rd_rw612_bga requires fetching binary blobs, which can be achieved by running the following command:

west blobs fetch hal_nxp

Programming and Debugging

Build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Configuring a Debug Probe

A debug probe is used for both flashing and debugging the board. This board is configured by default to use the JLink Firmware.

Configuring a Console

Connect a USB cable from your PC to J7, and use the serial terminal of your choice (minicom, putty, etc.) with the following settings:

  • Speed: 115200

  • Data: 8 bits

  • Parity: None

  • Stop bits: 1

Flashing

Here is an example for the Hello World application. This example uses the J-Link Debug Host Tools as default.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rd_rw612_bga samples/hello_world
west flash

Open a serial terminal, reset the board (press the RESET button), and you should see the following message in the terminal:

***** Booting Zephyr OS v3.4.0 *****
Hello World! rd_rw612_bga

Debugging

Here is an example for the Hello World application. This example uses the J-Link Debug Host Tools as default.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rd_rw612_bga samples/hello_world
west debug

Open a serial terminal, step through the application in your debugger, and you should see the following message in the terminal:

***** Booting Zephyr OS zephyr-v3.6.0 *****
Hello World! rd_rw612_bga

Bluetooth

BLE functionality requires to fetch binary blobs, so make sure to follow the Fetch Binary Blobs section first.

Those binary blobs can be used in two different ways, depending if CONFIG_NXP_MONOLITHIC_BT is enabled or not:

The required binary blob will be linked with the application image directly, forming one single monolithic image. The user has nothing else to do other than flashing the application to the board.

In this case, the BLE blob won’t be linked with the application, so the user needs to manually flash the BLE binary blob to the board at the address 0x18540000. The binary blob will be located here: <zephyr workspace>/modules/hal/nxp/zephyr/blobs/rw61x/rw61x_sb_ble_a2.bin

Board variants

Ethernet

To use ethernet on the RD_RW612_BGA board, you first need to make the following modifications to the board hardware:

Add resistors:

  • R485

  • R486

  • R487

  • R488

  • R489

  • R491

  • R490

Remove resistors:

  • R522

  • R521

  • R520

  • R524

  • R523

  • R508

  • R505

Then, build for the board target rd_rw612_bga//ethernet.

Resources