SPI NAND Flash Support for nRF54H20 in NCS v3.4.0 — Current Status and Roadmap?

[lammobile]

Hi Nordic team,

I am following up on a previous thread (nRF54L15 sQSPI support for SPI NAND in NCS v3.3.1) where it was confirmed that NAND flash was not supported in NCS v3.3.1, either through sQSPI/MSPI or standard SPI.

I would like to ask about the current status for NCS v3.4.0, specifically targeting the nRF54H20.

Background:

• NCS v3.4.0 is based on Zephyr 4.4, which introduced notable NAND flash support: 

  • A new jedec,spi-nand driver (drivers/flash/spi_nand.c) was added as a new MTD driver.
  • A new Flash Translation Layer (FTL) disk driver (zephyr,ftl-dhara) was introduced, providing wear leveling and bad block management, enabling NAND flash to be used as a standard disk device.

My questions are:

1. Is SPI NAND flash (via the new jedec,spi-nand driver from Zephyr 4.4) now officially supported in NCS v3.4.0 for the nRF54H20?
2. If not yet supported end-to-end in NCS, is there a planned roadmap or timeline for full NAND flash support (including ECC handling, bad block management, wear leveling via zephyr,ftl-dhara)?
3. Are there any known limitations or additional steps required to use the upstream Zephyr jedec,spi-nand driver with Nordic's SPI/sQSPI/MSPI transport on the nRF54H20?

Thank you.

[Pallavi Patil]

Hie Lam,

Is SPI NAND flash (via the new jedec,spi-nand driver from Zephyr 4.4) now officially supported in NCS v3.4.0 for the nRF54H20?

Yes, since NCS v3.4.0 is based on Zephyr 4.4, it supports SPI NAND flash.

Are there any known limitations or additional steps required to use the upstream Zephyr jedec,spi-nand driver with Nordic's SPI/sQSPI/MSPI transport on the nRF54H20?

I will update you with more information when I hear back from the team.

Please get back to us if you have any more questions.

Regards

Pallavi

[lammobile]

Thanks Pallavi for your information.

[lammobile]

Hi Pallavi Patil 

Do you have any updated information? Any examples for SPI NAND flash with the nRF52840-DK, nRF5340-DK, nRF7002-DK, or nRF54H20-DK would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Pallavi Patil]

We currently have basic flash driver support upstream for the nrf54l15dk (validated via tests/drivers/flash/interface_test and tests/drivers/flash/flash_common), but higher-level NAND features such as bad block management and wear leveling haven't been tested on this board yet. If your application requires these features, they would need to be handled by an abstraction layer like Dhara (for a block device/FTL) or littlefs (for a fail-safe file system). 

[lammobile]

Thanks Pallavi Patil 

Thank you for the information. I looked through the examples in sdk-zephyr/tests/drivers/flash/common/tests.yaml. I noticed that the NAND flash example is being built with the mikroe_flash_5_click board, but I couldn't find any examples using a Nordic board with a specific NAND flash chip. Could you please provide more details or guidance on this?

github.com/.../tests.yaml