nRF52832 WLCSP Package SWD Programming with nRF52DK (PCA10040)

[radleyp]

Dear Nordic FAE and fellow engineers,

I am using a custom board with nRF52832 WLCSP and I am trying to program it via SWD using NRF52DK PAC10040, and SES for programming SDK_17.0. I followed 2 layer reference design of NRF52832 CIAA, however the program still cannot be flashed onto the MCU even though it is showing on SES that it was programmed successfully. The connection for SWD programming followed is based on this link. Attached is the schematic and layout. Any suggestions are much appreciated, thank you.

[radleyp]

Hi, 

After further inspection, I find that there are some discrepancies in the register. My findings are as follow :

1. Below is the register read after flashing the program via SES where the BLE application is running properly.

2. Below is the register read after power restart where the BLE cannot be detected on the mobile phone.

3. However, the program runs again after I did verify in SES (target --> verify) or when I connect it on nRF Connect Programmer.

4. When programming the device with hex file via nrfjprog --program ble_app_uart_pca10040_s132.hex --sectoranduicrerase, the read register is also different. It becomes as follow :

It looks like there are errors in my setup, please advise what I did wrong, thank you.

Regards,

Reno

[Jared]

Hi,

The content of the registers is dependent on when you check them in the execution of the program and what compiler that is used to build the application. It doesn't really tell us what the error is.

Build an unmodified example from the SDK in debug mode and flash it to your custom board. The only thing that you should modify is the custom board map that maps the pins correctly. A error message should then be outputted when the application hits an error. 

Note, that your original problems statement was that it wasn't flashed properly to the board. But it seems that the application is indeed flashed properly, but that it's running into some run-time error. Exactly what error is what we're trying to figure out. 

regards

Jared