Cannot use QSPI between nrf54LM20DK and nrf7002-EBII

[Muhammad Abdullah Jean]

Dear nordic support team,

Hi! Wish you have a good day.

I am currently using the nRF54LM20 DK, which has the nRF54LM20B MCU. I would like to use the EXP pins to connect an external nrf7002-EBII expansion board for high speed wifi connection.

The issue is that communication between the expansion board and the main board currently supports SPI, but not QSPI. As far as I know, Nordic has not released a QSPI driver for this platform yet. However, the nrf7002-EBII itself supports QSPI as I can see the testing point labelled 'QSPI' on the board.

Could you please let me know whether Nordic has any plan to provide official QSPI driver support for the EXP pins of nRF54LM20B in the future? That reallly helps.

Thanks for your attention!

Sincerely,

Jean

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

SQSPI, when supported, will be included in this repository:

https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/nrf_wifi/tree/main/bus_if/bus

 

At this time, it is not present.

Unfortunately, I do not have detailed knowledge about roadmap related questions, but if you contact sales via this:

https://www.nordicsemi.com/About-us/Contact-Us

 

Then you should get in touch with personell that can help you with this.

 

Kind regards,

Håkon

[Muhammad Abdullah Jean]

Hi Håkon,

Thanks for your ongoing support. I have discussed this with Nicholas from the sales team. While he clarified the hardware pinout constraints, I still need your technical assistance regarding the software implementation.

We are using the nRF54LM20 DK with the nRF7002 EB-II shield for Wi-Fi development. We are currently facing a throughput bottleneck of 2300 kbps, whereas we achieved 8000 kbps on the nRF7002 DK with the same configuration. I suspect this is due to the 8 MHz SPI speed limit. To improve this, we want to use QSPI.

Nicholas mentioned that while the nRF54LM20 lacks a dedicated hardware QSPI peripheral, it supports a "soft QSPI" (sQSPI) solution utilizing the RISC-V core. Could you advise on the necessary software configurations to enable this sQSPI communication between the nRF54LM20 DK and the nRF7002 EB-II shield?

Regarding the hardware setup, Nicholas noted that sQSPI requires pins P2.00–P2.05, which are connected to the on-board flash and not routed directly to the P4 header. We are not using the external flash, so these pins are available. Given this layout, do we need to use jumper wires to route the sQSPI pins from the 7002 EB-II shield to these specific P2 ports on the nRF54LM20 DK?

Sincerely,

Jean