Problem with radio frequency custom board. Balun mismatch?

[angel]

Hi Nordic,

I have an application that perfectly runs in the nrf51DK but that does not work in my custom board. In my custom board everything else works (i2c, leds lighting, etc..) except for the communication related stuff. I think I am having some problems with the antenna. The balun I am using is 2450BM08B0003, which is the one recommended in this page for the nrf51422. As a detail, the components in the board have been placed by hand and soldered with oven reflow.

Here I attach the parts of the design that have to do with the communication.

Any idea on how to debug my problem? I have no idea what is going on. I have been reading some other people have the exact same problem, but I have yet no idea of a proper solution.

PS: Sometimes we can transmit data from our custom board to the nordic developer kit. But not the other way around, we cannot receive data. Is this usual?

Thanks for your help!

[Andreas]

Hi Angel, Michael has a lot of good points regarding the antenna. To sum it up:

• There should not be any signal traces beneath the antenna.
• There are no tuning components for the antenna. (this is increasingly important with a via in the RF path.
• The antenna must be tuned using a network analyzer for optimum performance. This is hard without any tuning components though.

In addition I have some comments:

• The balun you are using is designed for the WLCSP package version, and thus transforms the load impedance into a different one than the QFN package version requires for optimum performance. The correct Johanson part would be 2450BM14E0003 in your case.
• This particular antenna is a meander antenna design, which relies on the geometry in order to radiate. The total length is not relevant as in a monopole antenna. It looks very much like an antenna which we have been using in a lot of our designs, but one of the sides is too short, which will decrease the radiation efficiency.
• The antenna should be placed on the end of the board, not in the middle. Ideally (for this one at least) there should be free space on three sides, and a ground plane on the feed side.
• The balun is not properly grounded, there should be a larger land with multiple vias to bottom/internal ground planes around the ground solder pad. The balun seems to be placed approximately the correct distance from the nRF though.
• There is a 15 nH inductor missing between L1 and C11 for filtering noise from the DCDC converter.

As Michael said you might be better off redoing the layout. Prioritize the antenna and radio placement, place it where it will radiate freely, and where it is free from metal objects and e.g. not covered by a hand when used. Also, if you did not already, check out the nRF51 PCB design tutorial and the reference design with Johanson balun, which also contains Altium designer files that you can use. Using the nRF51-Dongle HW files you can also see how to use the nRF51 with this kind of antenna, however with a discrete component matching network.

And as always, please feel free to submit your design for review before shipping it off to production.

[angel]

Thank you very much guys. These are the steps we are going to follow now:

Short term (couple of days):

• I will order the balun that you say
• I will make sure that we solder it properly (by hand, difficult to make sure..)
• Since I can get messages from my custom board (but not the other way around) I will check the signal strength as Michael suggested.
• I will check if the voltage arriving to the balun has any noise at all
• Since my application has timers, I2C communication and everything works quite good, I am assuming that the 16MHz crystal is working properly.

In the long term (1-1.5 weeks):

• Redo the layout with all the details you suggest, using inductor and correct balun, removing vias and nets behind the antenna, etc..