What is best practice for creating board files for the nRF9160?

[Craig12]

As I understand it, any applications using the modem libraries on the nRF9160 must be built in the non-secure domain.

The MCUboot and TF-M needs to be in the secure domain.

The nRFConnect plug-in for visual studio has a great "Create a new board" helper, but it will only create board files for nRF9160 Secure or Non-Secure. It won't do a hybrid with _ns extensions.

Is there a way to easily create such a hybrid board files for the nRF916x parts?

Or is there a better practice to build the bootloader and TF-M in one project targeting a secure version of your board files, and then create your application in a separate project using different non-secure versions of your board files? Potentially this offers a benefit as you are not always rebuilding the bootloader.

[runsiv]

Hi Craig

We have covered this in our nRF Connect Intermediate course lesson 3 which you can find here. Depending on the version of NCS you are planning to use I would pay attention the note in the beginning of Lesson 3 regarding a new hardware model for custom boards that is implemented in upstream Zephyr. This change is part of the release candidate for NCS 2.7 which is out now(NCS v2.7-rc1). There is a porting guide out for custom boards created before NCS 2.7 which you can find here. I just think it's worth mentioning if you are about to start working on a new board. I can't give a timeline for NCS 2.7, but with release candidate I don't expect it to be a long wait before you see NCS 2.7

Regards

Runar