Nordic nRF boards (microbit)

The Nordic nRF_ chips are a family of Arm-based System-on-Chip that are designed to be used for low-power and short-range wireless solutions.

.. _Nordic nRF: https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products

The nRF51 series is the first series for short range wireless applications. It is superseded by the nRF52 series. The following machines are based on this chip :

• microbit BBC micro:bit board with nRF51822 SoC

There are other series such as nRF52, nRF53 and nRF91 which are currently not supported by QEMU.

Supported devices

• Arm Cortex-M0 (ARMv6-M)
• Serial ports (UART)
• Clock controller
• Timers
• Random Number Generator (RNG)
• GPIO controller
• NVMC
• SWI

Missing devices

• Watchdog
• Real-Time Clock (RTC) controller
• TWI (i2c)
• SPI controller
• Analog to Digital Converter (ADC)
• Quadrature decoder
• Radio

Boot options

The Micro:bit machine can be started using the -device option to load a firmware in ihex format_. Example:

.. _ihex format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HEX

.. code-block:: bash

$ qemu-system-arm -M microbit -device loader,file=test.hex