Unable to bringup nRF54H20 EngA version custom board

[Anuj Pathak]

Hi,

We’ve successfully developed our first few custom development boards based on the nRF54H20 MCU, using the Fanstel BM20C module. However, we've discovered that the module contains the EngA silicon revision of the nRF54H20, which has limited support.

We are planning a board re-spin with the updated silicon version, but it would be extremely helpful if we could first verify the functionality of the onboard peripherals. While we've been able to test I2C peripherals through an exposed header using the nRF54H20 DK, we are currently unable to verify the SPI, EXMIF, and PDM peripherals as they are not exposed on the current revision.

If there are any setup instructions or guidance for running basic samples on the EngA variant—even if they are not fully stable—that would be immensely valuable and could potentially save us a full hardware revision cycle.

The debugger connection is working correctly, and we have been able to successfully flash samples from NCS 2.6.4, targeting the nRF54H20 PDK variant.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Anuj

[Hung Bui]

Hi Anuj,

Supports for EngA (and EngB) has been removed from NCS v2.9.0. 
It's not recommended to continue your development with EngA. And unfortunately we don't have any workaround or unstable release that you can use to test SPI, EXMIF, and PDM. 

For that purpose I would suggest to get latest nRF54H20 DK. 

[Anuj Pathak]

As per v2.8.0 doc, SPI is supported, can we use it (or any other version) with EngA revision somehow to verify at least on board SPI peripherals?
We only want to verify on-boards peripheral communication. We can use previous NCS versions just to verify.

[Hung Bui]

Hi, 
Could you tell which issue you have with SPI ? 
Which exact SPI did you try ? 
As far as I know SPI120/121 doesn't work on EngA, but SPI130 does.

Please try to play with the pins as well (but make sure you follow the recommendation about pins in the datasheet) as some pins may not work (Port 2, Pin 3 and 6 are not working SPIM130) 

[Anuj Pathak]

Hi,

We are not able to provision the board as per https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-3.0.1/page/nrf/releases_and_maturity/abi_compatibility.html

There is no mention of EngA version so we guessed that 0.6.5 or before are compatible, and we tried all binaries and bicr, but provisioning failed at unable to change boot mode. We have even tried generating custom bicr as per our board specification but that too didn't help us proceed with provisioning.

At the moment we are only trying to blink an led at p1.03 or 1.05,1.06
once we verify the firmware is running we'll try simple SPI setup to verify our on board peripherals are able to communicate.

Regards

[Hung Bui]

Hi Anuj,

No NCS v3.0.1 won't work with EngA. I mentioned that from 2.9.0 we removed support for EngA. You would need to stick to the older SDK. 
Again, it's strongly recommended to switch to the newer version of the chip. 

[Anuj Pathak]

Hi

I am completely aware that EngA/B support is dropped in v2.9.0. That link is to refer the compatibility matrix which mentions different NCS version compatibility with the given binary revision.

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-3.0.1/page/nrf/releases_and_maturity/abi_compatibility.html#abi_compatibility_matrix_for_the_nrf54h20_soc_binaries

2.8.0 row only lists 0.7.0 binaries for EngB and EngC silicon, and there is no mention of EngA anywhere.

Please look again and provide feedback

[Hung Bui]

Hi Anuj, 

You mentioned that you were able to test with I2C, what's the problem of testing SPI130 on that board ? 

Anuj Pathak said:

There is no mention of EngA version so we guessed that 0.6.5 or before are compatible, and we tried all binaries and bicr, but provisioning failed at unable to change boot mode.

I assume you have a fresh board and you want to provision it ? 

I am not so sure if the SoC binaries needed for EngA version. As far as I remember I didn't have to do provisioning when I get started with the PDK. 

I'm afraid that not much we can do, and moving to newer chip version is the way to go.