Getting started with nRF7002 DK

The nRF7002 DK (PCA10143) is a single-board development kit for evaluation and development on the Nordic nRF7002, a Wi-Fi companion IC to Nordic nRF5340 System-on-Chip (SoC) host processor.

Overview

The nRF7002 is an IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) compliant solution that implements the Wi-Fi physical layer and MAC layer protocols. It implements the 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 build target provides support for the application core on the nRF5340 SoC. The nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpunet build target provides support for the network core on the nRF5340 SoC.

nRF7002 DK

nRF7002 PDK (Preview DK will later be replaced by the certified nRF7002 DK)

Hardware

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.

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

QSPI

on-chip

qspi

SPI(M/S)

on-chip

spi

UARTE

on-chip

serial

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Other hardware features are not supported by the nRF Connect SDK kernel.

Connections and IOs

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

LED

  • LED1 (green) = P1.06

  • LED2 (green) = P1.07

Push buttons

  • BUTTON1 = SW1 = P1.08

  • BUTTON2 = 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) 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 nRF Connect SDK applications with Arm TrustZone

Applications on the nRF5340 can contain both a secure and a non-secure firmware image for the application core. You can build the secure image using either nRF Connect SDK or Trusted Firmware M (TF-M). You must always build the non-secure firmware images using nRF Connect SDK.

Note

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

Building the firmware with TF-M

To build the secure firmware image using TF-M and the non-secure firmware image using nRF Connect SDK, complete the following steps:

  1. Build the non-secure nRF Connect SDK application for the application core using the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp_ns build target.

    To invoke the building of TF-M, the nRF Connect SDK build system requires the Kconfig option CONFIG_BUILD_WITH_TFM to be enabled, which is set by default when building nRF Connect SDK as a non-secure application.

    The nRF Connect SDK build system performs the following steps automatically:

    1. Build the non-secure firmware image as a regular nRF Connect SDK application.

    2. Build a TF-M (secure) firmware image.

    3. Merge the output image binaries.

    4. Optionally, build a bootloader image (MCUboot).

    Note

    Depending on the TF-M configuration, an application DTS overlay can be required to adjust the non-secure image flash memory partition and SRAM starting address and sizes.

  2. Build the application firmware for the network core using the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpunet build target.

Building the secure firmware using nRF Connect SDK

To build the secure and the non-secure firmware images using nRF Connect SDK, complete the following steps:

  1. Build the secure nRF Connect SDK application for the application core using the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp build target.

    Also set CONFIG_TRUSTED_EXECUTION_SECURE to y and CONFIG_BUILD_WITH_TFM to n in the application project configuration file.

  2. Build the non-secure nRF Connect SDK application for the application core using the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp_ns build target.

  3. Merge the two binaries.

  4. Build the application firmware for the network core using the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpunet build target.

When building a secure and non-secure application for the nRF5340 application core, the secure application must set the IDAU (SPU) configuration to allow non-secure access to all CPU resources used by the non-secure application firmware. SPU configuration must be applied before jumping to the non-secure application.

Building a secure-only application

Build the nRF Connect SDK application as described in Building and programming an application, using the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp build target for the firmware running on the nRF5340 application core and the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpunet build target for the firmware running on the nRF5340 network core.

Programming the firmware to the DK

Follow the instructions in the Building and programming an application page to build and flash applications.

Note

To flash and debug applications on the nRF7002 DK you must use the nRF Command Line Tools version 10.12.0 or above. For further information on how to install the nRF Command Line Tools, see Updating repositories and tools.

Debugging

See the Testing and debugging an application page for information about debugging.

Testing the LEDs and buttons in the nRF7002 DK

The following samples allow you to test if the buttons (or switches) and LEDs on the development kit are working properly with nRF Connect SDK:

Build and flash the samples to make sure nRF Connect SDK is running correctly on your development kit. For the button and LED definitions, see the boards/arm/nrf7002dk_nrf5340/nrf5340_cpuapp_common.dts file.