PN7120 won't not respond on the I2C bus unless CORE_RESET_CMD is sent in <1sec after power-up

NXP’s PN7120 is NFC controller for contactless communication at 13.56MHz. It interfaces with the host CPU via the I2C bus. The I2C slave address of  PN7120 is 0b010100Lx, where L is a configurable LSB of the address (by pin B2, I2CADDR0), and x is the standard I2C R/W bit. Hence the normal I2C address is either 0x28 or 0x29:

// write to device at address 0x28, R/W=Write
i2c_master_write_byte(cmd, (0x28 << 1) | WRITE_BIT, ACK_CHECK_EN);

According to UM10819 User Manual, Fig. 23 on page 35, the first NCI command after reset must be the CORE_RESET_CMD, which is followed by an appropriate response from PN7120.

The CORE_RESET_CMD is simply this byte sequence:

const uint8_t nci_core_reset_cmd[] = { 0x20, 0x00, 0x01, 0x01 };

What they don’t tell us in the datasheet (or else I could not find it): there is a boot timeout cca 990ms after the reset is removed (pin VEN=1) within which the CORE_RESET_CMD must be recevied. If it is not received, the PN7120 goes in a strange power-down mode and will no longer respond on the I2C bus! Only a new hw reset via VEN can bring it out of the power-down.

This picture provides updated boot state diagram of PN7120:

CORE_RESET_CMD on the I2C bus:

Simply no repospone on I2C address 0x28 if there was no CORE_RESET_CMD within 990ms after PN7120 reset:

Our hardware: ESP32 and Mikroelektronika’s NFC Click.