Does NFC content on nrf52832 remain readable when not powered?

[jvinc]

Hi all,

We are currently developing a BLE enabled sensor device. We want to use the NFC component to identify the sensor by writing a device ID to the tag.

Question: Will the NFC component retain it's contents when the battery is removed/goes flat (in the same way a passive tag retains it's contents without power)?

If the answer is no, then is there a workaround by placing a passive NFC chip on the board connected to the same antenna?

Thank you in advance!

[endnode]

Well this depends on how you implement the app data management on top of NFC communication protocols (I believe this applies even if you use LIBs provided by Nordic). However nRF52 chips cannot work in "battery off" mode, the chip must be always powered to operate, there is no inducting power transfer of nRF52 over antenna from 13MHz field so if you want to support such use case (e.g. when battery is not removable in your device) then you must populate another chip to your board.

[FormerMember]

The NFC data is stored in RAM. So if the chip is power cycled (f.ex flat battery), the content will be lost. If you want to make sure NFC data is not lost upon a power cycle, the data should be stored in flash. To do so, you can use the Flash Data Storage module (FDS).