NXP i.MX93 EVK (Cortex-A55)

Overview

The i.MX93 Evaluation Kit (MCIMX93-EVK board) is a platform designed to show the most commonly used features of the i.MX 93 Applications Processor in a small and low cost package. The MCIMX93-EVK board is an entry-level development board, which helps developers to get familiar with the processor before investing a large amount of resources in more specific designs.

i.MX93 MPU is composed of one cluster of 2x Cortex-A55 cores and a single Cortex®-M33 core. Zephyr OS is ported to run on one of the Cortex®-A55 core.

  • Board features:

    • RAM: 2GB LPDDR4

    • Storage:

      • SanDisk 16GB eMMC5.1

      • microSD Socket

    • Wireless:

      • Murata Type-2EL (SDIO+UART+SPI) module. It is based on NXP IW612 SoC, which supports dual-band (2.4 GHz /5 GHz) 1x1 Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and 802.15.4

    • USB:

      • Two USB 2.0 Type C connectors

    • Ethernet

    • PCI-E M.2

    • Connectors:

      • 40-Pin Dual Row Header

    • LEDs:

      • 1x Power status LED

      • 2x UART LED

    • Debug

      • JTAG 20-pin connector

      • MicroUSB for UART debug, two COM ports for A55 and M33

Supported Features

The Zephyr mimx93_evk board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

GIC-v4

on-chip

interrupt controller

ARM TIMER

on-chip

system clock

UART

on-chip

serial port

Devices

System Clock

This board configuration uses a system clock frequency of 24 MHz. Cortex-A55 Core runs up to 1.7 GHz.

Serial Port

This board configuration uses a single serial communication channel with the CPU’s UART4.

Programming and Debugging

Copy the compiled zephyr.bin to the first FAT partition of the SD card and plug the SD card into the board. Power it up and stop the u-boot execution at prompt.

Use U-Boot to load and kick zephyr.bin to Cortex-A55 Core1:

fatload mmc 1:1 0xc0000000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; cpu 1 release 0xc0000000

Or use the following command to kick zephyr.bin to Cortex-A55 Core0:

fatload mmc 1:1 0xc0000000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; go 0xc0000000

Use this configuration to run basic Zephyr applications and kernel tests, for example, with the Synchronization Sample:

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b mimx93_evk_a55 samples/synchronization
west build -t run

This will build an image with the synchronization sample app, boot it and display the following ram console output:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build zephyr-v3.2.0-8-g1613870534a0  ***
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx93_evk_a55!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx93_evk_a55!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx93_evk_a55!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx93_evk_a55!

References

More information can refer to NXP official website: NXP website.