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nRF54

Authors:
Geoffrey Hunter
Geoffrey Hunter
Published On:
Feb 4, 2025
Last Updated:
Feb 4, 2025

The nRF54 Series is a family of SoCs by Nordic Semiconductor. Some of the core features of this family are a low power multi-protocol 2.4GHZ radio, a 128 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 CPU and ultra low-energy operation. Within the nRF54 family there are two sub-families, the nRF54H and nRF54L series1

The nRF54 series has good support for using the Zephyr framework to develop the firmware, as is officially backed by Nordic Semiconductor. Zephyr provides a RTOS, peripheral drivers and utility API. There are many project examples and guides available for using Zephyr with the nRF54.

nRF54L Series

A photo of the nRF54L15 SoC in a 6x6 mm QFN package.2

This is a placeholder for the reference: fig-nrf54l-internal-architecture-block-diagram shows the internal architecture block diagram of the nRF54L series SoC.

The internal architecture block diagram of the nRF54L series SoC.1

In the nRF54L series there are three SoCs, the nRF54L15, nRF54L10 and nRF54L05 (excluding package type, there are a number of suffixes on each of these to denote the package type). They differentiate themselves by having different amounts of RAM and NVM memory. Note that we can’t really call the NVM flash, as Nordic uses RRAM (resistive random access memory) for the NVM. This is a placeholder for the reference: table-nrf54l-series-socs-memory-specs shows the memory specifications for each of the SoCs.

SoC Part NumberRAMNVM (RRAM)
nRF54L0596 kB0.5 MB
nRF54L10192 kB1 MB
nRF54L15256 kB1.5 MB
The memory specifications for the nRF54L series SoCs.1

Tamper Detection

The nRF54L series SoCs have a built-in tamper controlled called TAMPC. This tamper controller can do the following:

  • Detect internal timing glitches to protect against fault injection attacks such as voltage spiking or electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI).
  • Detect external tampering via sending a PRBS (pseudo-random bit sequence) pattern to an output pin and making sure the same pattern is received on an input pin (this is designed to be connected to an external tamper shield which detects when the product is broken in to).
  • Detect if tampering occurs during AED and IKG operations (the CRACEN detector).
The internal block diagram of the TAMPC.1

Footnotes

  1. Nordic Semiconductor. nRF54L15, nRF54L10, and nRF54L05 Wireless SoCs - PRELIMINARY DATASHEET v0.8 [datasheet]. Retrieved 2025-02-04, from https://docs-be.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ps_nrf54L15/page/pdf/nRF54L15_nRF54L10_nRF54L05_Datasheet_v0.8.pdf. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Nordic Semiconductor. nRF54L15 - System-on-Chip - Ultra-low-power wireless SoC [product page]. Retrieved 2025-02-04, from https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF54L15. ↩