nRF51: Expectable flashing speed in production?

[Adam Heinrich]

Dear developers,

we are considering purchase of a reliable programmer capable to flash the nRF51822 in production, one possible option is the SEGEGR FLASHER PORTABLE or FLASHER ARM. I know that the programming speed highly depends on the actual target hardware.

The programmer I use for development is able to achieve just 23.7KiB/s. Is it reasonable to expect a significant improvement when using a production-grade programmer? What speeds do you achieve for production programming?

Thank you,

Adam Heinrich

[RK]

That's really slow - what are you using? For SWD it doesn't really depend so much on the target hardware, although of course you can't write flash faster than the flash can be written. The SWD interface itself doesn't (anywhere I've ever seen) specify a maximum frequency, the interface hardware itself is ARM's IP and is pretty standard so the maximum speed tends to be dominated by how good your physical link is, how short it is and how little capacitance you can get on it.

SEGGER claims up to 3MB/s into RAM with their JLINK, 1MB/s with the lower end ones. That's peak and optimal, but you really should be able to write into nRF flash about at a similar speed you could write it from the processor. So yes, much faster.

[Sigurd]

Hi Adam,

Try to increase the SWD speed[typically given in kHz]. For production programming we have a infocenter page here you should take a look at. We also have a more detailed whitepaper here.