Run BLE controller on Application Core

[Timon-10XBeta]

I'm interested in using the Application core as the monolithic processor for my entire BLE application, similar to how you worked on the nRF52840, so the BLE controller would run together with the BLE host on the same core.

From the documentation I'm not entirely sure if some of the radio functionality is inherently tied to the network core or if the differentiation is just semantics and differences in the feature set available to each ARM core and they are equals in terms of access to peripherals. 

The background here is that I would like to run a completely separate "bare metal" application on the network core without any other code present.
I would still like to communicate with the application on the application core via shared memory but otherwise the two applications should be completely separated and no BLE code should sit on the network core and instead fully located on the application core.

[Hieu]

Hi Timon-10XBeta,

Unfortunately, what you are looking for is not feasible, because the application core cannot access the Radio peripheral, and thus cannot alone handle a BLE application. You can refer to information from the nRF5340 Product Specifications, section Peripherals, Application Core Instantiation, and Network Core Instantiation.

The opposite might be possible, with the entire BLE application on the network core, and the bare metal application on the application core. There will be some difficulties, such as no official support, implementation of peripheral forwarding, smaller flash size on the network core. But you probably expected all of that when you decide to explore your idea.

If you are interested in that option, I will ask some internal people for comments on the feasibility of the idea.

Hieu

[Timon-10XBeta]

Thanks for confirming. Indeed that would make our idea not viable.