There's a massive update on what I've been working on in case it’s useful to anyone here working with UWB firmware with iOS/watchOS.
openaliro used the iPhone with a key in Apple Wallet to pair and range/unlock over UWB+BLE with the nrf5340DK + DWM3000EVB approach; it was kind of expensive and could be optimized.
I got the whole protocol to work with a DWM3001CDK ($20 chip).
The part worth posting here is the DWM3001CDK target. It runs entirely on a single chip, it has an nRF52833 with the DW3110 beside it, no separate MCU board, no messy wiring with a DWM3000EVB.
The single chip contains: the BLE peripheral, the Aliro reader, a Matter node and an OpenThread MTD and the full UWB ranging stack with a stock iOS/watchOS. It also has mcuboot with DFU FOTA via BLE; all of this in 409KB flash and 125KB RAM.
The Matter node is hand-rolled, because chip fw does not fit the nrf52833. Tested it out on hardware: Apple Home provisional pairing with a live lock tile, walk-up unlock with the phone in the pocker (the Wallet animation plays) also the Apple watch, and DFU FOTA via Bluetooth. There are ports esp32 variants and nrf5340dk and also support for multiple NFC chipsets.
The code also has multiple nfc chipsets, nrf5340dk (how it all began), multiple uwb transceivers, some community support for AI Thinker BU04 chipset, as well as ports for ESP32-S3/C5/C6.
The firmware can directly flashed from the chrome/firefox browser for esp32x: https://openaliro.github.io/openaliro/flash/
Digital twin to virtually test real hardware how it's working right now is here: https://openaliro.github.io/openaliro/twin.html