Sona™ IF513 - Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth® 5.4 Module

The Sona IF513 uses SDIO 3.0 for Wi-Fi and HS-UART for Bluetooth.

The Sona IF513 is a 5.4 spec Dual-Mode Bluetooth radio. The primary Bluetooth features are:

• BDR + EDR + BLE (Classic + BLE)
• LE 2 Mbps PHY
• LE Long Range (LE-LR)
• Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH)
• Secure Simple Pairing (SSP)
• UART baud rates upto 4 Mbps
• Quality of Service (QoS)
• Fast Connect (Interlaced page and inquiry scans)
• Dedicated BT path with MHF4 connector or trace pin

The does not support a single antenna (SISO) mode for the Wi-Fi. It requires two antennas for the Wi-Fi interface and one antenna for the Bluetooth interface. This is done for performance as the Bluetooth radio is on a separate signal chain from the Wi-Fi.

The Sona-IF513 does support single antenna (SISO) or two antenna (Diversity) options.

An Ezurio Wi-Fi module can be configured for AP-Sta mode with the following nmcli commands:

• iw dev wlan0 interface add wlan1 type __ap
• nmcli con add con-name myap ifname wlan1 type wifi ssid myapssid autoconnect yes 802.11-wireless.mode ap ipv4.method shared
• nmcli con add con-name mysta ifname wlan0 type wifi ssid mystassid

This is assumes that you have the iw and dnsmasq packages installed in your build.

Note: In the above configuration, the Access Point will follow the channel that the station associates to. Therefore it is reccomended that the client is configured to use a 2.4 GHz channel or the U-NII-1 channels in the 5 GHz band as the Ezurio radios will not work as DFS masters and do not support AP mode in the rest for the 5 GHz channels nor in the 6 GHz band.>

Yes, If you decide to use NetworkManager, then systemd-networkd should be removed from the system. We would recommend changing Yocto systemd PACKAGECONFIG to not build it into image.

Yes, the Sona-IF513 supports Virtual Simultaneous Dual Band (VSDB) operation.

In an AP and STAion (APSTA) kind of application it is necessary to bring up up the access point (AP) in one band before connecting as a STAtion in the other band.

After building a default image for the NXP i.MX8 LPDDR4 DVK device tree is such that M2 slot provides PCIe connectivity.

However, SDIO device tree is generated and available in the image.

The parameter "fdtfile=" in U-Boot needs to be changed.

Change "fdtfile=imx8mp-evk-revb4.dtb" to "fdtfile=imx8mp-evk-usdhc1-m2.dtb" by:

u-boot=> setenv fdtfile imx8mp-evk-revb4-usdhc1-m2.dtb
u-boot=> saveenv

Reference:

root@imx8mp-lpddr4-evk:~# ls /dev/mmc*
/dev/mmcblk2       /dev/mmcblk2boot0  /dev/mmcblk2boot1  /dev/mmcblk2p1     /dev/mmcblk2p2     /dev/mmcblk2rpmb
root@imx8mp-lpddr4-evk:~# mount /dev/mmcblk2p1 /media/
root@imx8mp-lpddr4-evk:~# ls /media | grep usdhc
imx8mp-evk-revb4-usdhc1-m2.dtb
imx8mp-evk-usdhc1-m2.dtb