Hi,
I'm designing a battery-powered active RFID timing base station and I'm evaluating the nRF54L10 for it. Patrick from Nordic suggested the nRF54L series over the older parts I was looking at, and the L10 looks like a great fit on power, cost and availability. Before I commit the schematic I'd like to clear up one thing about clocking.
The product needs a 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 link to talk to existing transponders, hardware RX timestamping, and timing accuracy of around 0.5 ppm that has to hold on the device itself. It runs standalone most of the time with no PC or GPS to sync against, so the accuracy has to come from the on-board reference rather than from periodic correction.
A standard crystal only gets me to about 10 ppm, so I'm planning to use a 32 MHz clipped-sine TCXO instead. On the nRF52840 the documented way to do this is to feed the TCXO into XC1 with XC2 grounded, AC-coupled, at 200 to 1000 mVpp. That guidance is a few years old and was given as "works but not characterised," so I want to ask about the newer part directly.
My questions for the nRF54L10:
- Does it support an external TCXO or high-stability clock driven into the device, and what is the recommended way to do it? Is it the same XC1 input approach as the nRF52840, or something different on this family?
- Is that path officially supported and characterised on the nRF54L series, or still at-my-own-risk?
- Does driving an external reference have any effect on radio PLL lock, 802.15.4 compliance, or the jitter of the hardware timestamp?
For background, I'm replacing an older two-chip design that used a separate radio MCU with a 16 MHz 0.28 ppm TCXO, and I'm trying to keep that same level of timing stability on a single modern Nordic SoC. I'll be validating the TCXO approach on a dev kit before laying out the board, so any official recommendation for the nRF54L10 would help me design it right the first time.
Thanks