Information on PPFC

[Yeswanth]

I have been reading about code regions in the nrf reference manual and understood about CLENR0 and how to use it. I have however, two questions

1. What is Pre Programmed factory content? There is register to find whether the PPFC is present or not but what exactly is this content and where is it located.

2. Why is CLENR0 located in two places : FICR and UICR and which one overrides which if there are different values for both

Thanks

[John]

Hello,

I would suggest reading sections 7 & 8 of the "nRF51_Series_Reference_Manual_v3.0".

1. Section 7 on the FICR registers shows that the PPFC is just one of the FICR registers and that it has been deprecated. Apparently PPFC is PreProgrammed Factory Code and these chips do not come preprogrammed from the factory.

2. I imagine the CLENR0 in the FICR would have been used if the chips were shipped preprogrammed. Since they are not that register is also marked as deprecated. I would imagine the UICR would override the FICR if the devices did come preprogrammed as it would imply the customer has loaded a new version over the factory programmed code.

John

[Yeswanth]

Thanks for pointing to the newer version of the reference manual, I was looking at v2.1. I should check what this means to the revision of silicon.

I still wonder what the pre programmed content used to be though. PPFC tells us whether the "content" is present or not but what content is this - is what I am not sure.

Thanks Yeswanth

[John]

I can only speculate, but I think what it would have meant is that the chip came from the factory with FW programmed in region 0. Given the large number of available stack options this probably would have been a bit of a bear to manage and hence it was dropped. Just a guess.

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

@John DeWitt: You are absolutely correct. The first revision of nRF51422 hardware had preprogrammed S210 ANT softdevice in code region 0. This was dropped in nRF51422 revision 2 as customers were not pleased with not being able to update the softdevice on the chip, they had to buy a new hardware in order to get a more recent softdevice. So as nRF51 Ref Manual v3.0 states, both CLENR0 and PPFC are deprecated.