Features of the nRF54L15 PDK

The nRF54L15 PDK embeds an Arm® Cortex®-M33 processor with multiprotocol 2.4 GHz transceiver and supports Bluetooth® 5.4.

For additional information, see the following documentation:

Supported protocols

The nRF54L15 PDK supports Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), proprietary protocols (including Enhanced ShockBurst), Matter, and Thread.

Amazon Sidewalk

Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network designed to provide a stable and reliable connection to your device. Ring and Echo device can act as a gateway, meaning they can share a portion of internet bandwidth providing the connection and services to Sidewalk end devices. Amazon Sidewalk for the nRF Connect SDK is based on two variants, one using Bluetooth® LE (more suited for home applications) and the other one using sub-GHz with the Semtech radio transceiver (for applications requiring longer range).

To learn more about the Amazon Sidewalk solution, see the Amazon Sidewalk documentation page.

Bluetooth Low Energy

The Bluetooth LE radio is designed for very low-power operation. When you develop a Bluetooth LE application, you must use the Bluetooth software stack. This stack is split into two core components: the Bluetooth Host and the Bluetooth LE Controller. The Controller user guide contains more information about the two available Bluetooth LE Controllers, and instructions for switching between them.

See the Bluetooth section of the Zephyr documentation for information on the Bluetooth Host and open source Bluetooth LE Controller. The nRF Connect SDK contains Bluetooth samples that can be run on the nRF54L15 PDK device. In addition, you can run the Bluetooth samples that are included from Zephyr.

For available libraries, see Bluetooth libraries and services (nRF Connect SDK) and API (Zephyr).

Enhanced ShockBurst

Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB) is a basic protocol supporting two-way data packet communication including packet buffering, packet acknowledgment, and automatic retransmission of lost packets. ESB provides radio communication with low power consumption, and the implementation is small in code size and easy to use.

See the Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB) user guide for information about how to work with Enhanced ShockBurst. To start developing, check out the Enhanced ShockBurst: Transmitter and Enhanced ShockBurst: Receiver samples.

Matter

Matter (formerly Project Connected Home over IP or Project CHIP) is an open-source application layer that aims at creating a unified communication standard across smart home devices, mobile applications, and cloud services. It supports a wide range of existing technologies, including Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth® LE, and uses IPv6-based transport protocols like TCP and UDP to ensure connectivity between different kinds of networks.

Matter in the nRF Connect SDK supports the System-on-Chip, multiprotocol platform design for the nRF54L15 SoC using Matter over Thread. You can read more about other available platform designs for Matter on the Matter platform design page. For more information about the multiprotocol feature, see Multiprotocol support.

See the Matter user guide for information about how to work with Matter applications. To start developing, check the Matter samples.

Thread

Thread is a low-power mesh networking technology, designed specifically for home automation applications. It is an IPv6-based standard that uses 6LoWPAN technology over the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. You can connect a Thread mesh network to the Internet with a Thread Border Router.

The nRF Connect SDK provides support for developing Thread applications based on the OpenThread stack. The OpenThread stack is integrated into Zephyr.

You can read more about other available platform designs for Thread on the OpenThread architectures page. For more information about the multiprotocol feature, see Multiprotocol support.

To start developing, check out the Thread samples.

Near Field Communication

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology for wireless transfer of small amounts of data between two devices that are in close proximity. The range of NFC is typically less than 10 cm.

Refer to the Near Field Communication (NFC) page for general information. See the NFC samples and Libraries for NFC for the samples and libraries that the nRF Connect SDK provides.

MCUboot bootloader support

The nRF54L15 PDK supports MCUboot as its bootloader, in the experimental phase. This means the following:

  • Only software cryptography is supported.

  • Single image pair is supported for dual-bank Device Firmware Update (DFU) targeted at the CPU application (the nrf54l15pdk/nrf54l51/cpuapp board target).

  • MCUboot can be configured as a first-stage bootloader (second-stage bootloader functionality is not yet available).

  • Serial recovery mode is also not yet supported.

Supported DFU protocols

The DFU process in the nRF54L15 PDK uses the MCUmgr protocol. It can be used for performing updates over Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) and serial connections.

For instructions on testing, see Testing the DFU solution.