IPC radio firmware

The IPC radio firmware allows to use the radio peripheral from another core in a multicore device.

Application overview

You can use this firmware as a general serialized radio peripheral.

The firmware supports both Bluetooth® Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4 simultaneously. In addition, you can configure the Bluetooth selection as an HCI Bluetooth Controller or an RPC serialization interface (Bluetooth Low Energy Remote Procedure Call).

HCI IPC serialization

The firmware exposes the Bluetooth Controller support to another core using the IPC subsystem.

Host for nRF RPC Bluetooth Low Energy

The firmware is running the full Bluetooth Low Energy stack. It receives serialized function calls that it decodes and executes, then sends response data to the client.

The serialization includes:

IEEE 802.15.4

The firmware exposes radio driver support to another core using the IPC subsystem.

Requirements

The firmware supports the following development kits:

Hardware platforms

PCA

Board name

Build target

Thingy:53

PCA20053

thingy53_nrf5340

thingy53_nrf5340_cpunet

nRF5340 DK

PCA10095

nrf5340dk_nrf5340

nrf5340dk_nrf5340_cpunet

To automatically attach the firmware image, you need to use the Sysbuild (System build).

Configuration

See Configuring and building an application for information about how to permanently or temporarily change the configuration.

Application

You can set the supported radio configurations using the following Kconfig options:

  • CONFIG_IPC_RADIO_BT - For the Bluetooth Low Energy serialization.

  • CONFIG_IPC_RADIO_802154 - For the IEEE 802.15.4 serialization.

You can select the Bluetooth Low Energy serialization using the CONFIG_IPC_RADIO_BT_SER Kconfig option.

The Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4 functionalities can operate simultaneously and are only limited by available memory.

Sysbuild

To enable the firmware, use the Sysbuild configuration of SB_CONFIG_NRF_DEFAULT_IPC_RADIO.

You can set the supported radio configurations using the following (Sysbuild) Kconfig options:

  • SB_CONFIG_NETCORE_IPC_RADIO_BT_HCI_IPC

  • SB_CONFIG_NETCORE_IPC_RADIO_BT_RPC

  • SB_CONFIG_NETCORE_IPC_RADIO_IEEE802154

Configuration files

The application provides predefined configuration files for typical use cases. You can find the configuration files in the application directory.

The following files are available:

  • overlay-802154.conf - Configuration file enabling IEEE 802.15.4.

  • overlay-bt_hci_ipc.conf - Configuration file enabling Bluetooth Low Energy over HCI.

  • overlay-bt_rpc.conf - Configuration file enabling Bluetooth Low Energy over RPC.

Building and running

This application can be found under applications/ipc_radio in the nRF Connect SDK folder structure.

To build the application with Visual Studio Code, follow the steps listed on the How to build an application page in the nRF Connect for VS Code extension documentation. See Configuring and building an application for other building scenarios, Programming an application for programming steps, and Testing and optimization for general information about testing and debugging in the nRF Connect SDK.

To enable a specific configuration overlay file, use the following command:

west build |application path| -b board_name -- -DEXTRA_CONF_FILE="overlay-***.conf"

You can add multiple configuration files separated by a semicolon. You cannot use Bluetooth Low Energy Remote Procedure Call together with the HCI Bluetooth Controller.

Note

When using Sysbuild, the configuration files are added automatically.

Dependencies

The dependencies may vary according to the configuration.

This firmware can use the following nRF Connect SDK libraries:

It can use the following sdk-nrfxlib library: