nRF7002 FICR - Region Registers Invalid state

[Phuoc K. Ly]

Hi all,

Recently I tried to program the FICR customer-programmable region of a new nRF7002 IC on a custom board.

During the learning process, I messed up by writing an invalid value to the REGION.PROTECT (attached) 0xFA50FA50 instead of 0x50FA50FA

Now on the shell command window, I cannot read or write into this register or any other register.

Is there a way I could perform a chip erase to set it back to the factory default setting since the current MAC address in this chip is 0 so it can not be used for any wifi application? Thanks a lot in advance.

Phuoc

[Simonr]

Hi

I'll have to get back to you tomorrow with a definitive answer here, as I need to check with the developers if there's a way around this when you've put it in an undefined state, although I have a sneaky suspicion there's not.

Best regards,

Simon

[Simonr]

Hi

I confirmed with the developers, and unfortunately there's not a way to recover the nRF7002 from an undefined state like this. This is one of the backsides with an OTP memory I'm afraid, but there's nothing we can do here. Sorry about the bad news.

Best regards,

Simon

[Phuoc K. Ly]

Hi

It was a little unfortunate but thank you for letting me know.

In this case, is there already a manual/tutorial/example procedure needs to be taken care of when working with the OTP ficr setup from the radio_test samples? Maybe a better approach for a large quantity chip setup solution as I would imagine it's not a good idea to manually program the chip before applying the application software for the product.

I found the FICR subcommands here FICR programming subcommands — nRF Connect SDK 2.2.0 documentation (nordicsemi.com) but it doesn't seem to provide clear instructions on how to approach it. (i.e., there might be some steps in between each read/write operation to apply the changes). Would you please provide more information about this topic since it's pretty critical for customers who develop their own products with the new nRF700x chip?

Best regards,

Phuoc

[Simonr]

Hi Phuoc

The OTP memory programming guidelines we have are available as part of the Device Commissioning and Characterization application note here. Hope you find it useful. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,

Simon