ARM MPS3 AN547

Overview

The mps3_an547 board configuration is used by Zephyr applications that run on the MPS3 AN547 board. It provides support for the MPS3 AN547 ARM Cortex-M55 CPU and the following devices:

  • Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC)

  • System Tick System Clock (SYSTICK)

  • Cortex-M System Design Kit GPIO

  • Cortex-M System Design Kit UART

  • Ethos-U55 NPU

ARM MPS3 AN547

This board configuration also supports using the Corstone-300 FVP to emulate a MPS3 AN547 hardware platform.

The Corstone-300 FVP (Fixed Virtual Platform) is a complete simulation of the Arm system, including processor, memory and peripherals. It is a available free of charge for Linux and Windows systems. The FVP has been selected for simulation since it provides access to the Ethos-U55 NPU, which is unavailable in QEMU or other simulation platforms.

To run the Fixed Virtual Platform simulation tool you must download “FVP model for the Corstone-300 MPS3” from Arm and install it on your host PC. This board has been tested with version 11.12.57 (Nov 2 2020).

Zephyr board options

The MPS3+ AN547 is an SoC with Cortex-M55 architecture. Zephyr provides support for building for both Secure and Non-Secure firmware.

The BOARD options are summarized below:

BOARD

Description

mps3_an547

For building Secure (or Secure-only) firmware

mps3_an547_ns

For building Non-Secure firmware

Hardware

ARM MPS3 AN547 provides the following hardware components:

  • ARM Cortex-M55

  • Soft Macro Model (SMM) implementation of SSE-300 subsystem

  • Memory

    • 8MB BRAM

    • 4GB DDR4 SODIMM (by default, upgradeable to 8GB)

    • 16GB eMMC

    • 8MB QSPI Flash

  • Debug

    • P‐JTAG, F-JTAG, SWD, 4-bit trace, 16-bit trace

    • Four serial ports over USB

  • Interface

    • AHB GPIO

    • UART

    • SPI

    • I2C

    • I2S

    • Color LCD serial interface

    • Ethernet

    • VGA

  • On-board Peripherals

    • Color LCD

    • 10 LEDs

    • 8 Switches

    • 2 user push buttons

Supported Features

The mps3_an547 board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

SYSTICK

on-chip

systick

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

Other hardware features are not currently supported by the port. See the MPS3 FPGA Website for a complete list of MPS3 AN547 board hardware features.

The default configuration can be found in the defconfig file: boards/arm/mps3_an547/mps3_an547_defconfig.

For mode details refer to MPS3 AN547 Technical Reference Manual (TRM).

Serial Port

The MPS3 AN547 has six UARTs. The Zephyr console output by default, uses UART0, which is exposed over the Debug USB interface (J8).

Serial port 0 on the Debug USB interface is the MCC board control console.

Serial port 1 on the Debug USB interface is connected to UART 0.

Serial port 2 on the Debug USB interface is connected to UART 1.

Serial port 3 on the Debug USB interface is connected to UART 2.

Programming and Debugging

Flashing

MPS3 AN547 provides:

  • A USB connection to the host computer, which exposes Mass Storage and CMSIS-DAP, and serial ports.

Building an application

You can build applications in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b mps3_an547 samples/hello_world

Open a serial terminal (minicom, putty, etc.) with the following settings:

  • Speed: 115200

  • Data: 8 bits

  • Parity: None

  • Stop bits: 1

Reset the board, and you should see the following message on the corresponding serial port:

Hello World! mps3_an547

Uploading an application to MPS3 AN547

Applications can be in elf, hex or bin format. The binaries are flashed when the board boots up, using files stored on the on-board Micro SD card. The Motherboard Configuration Controller (MCC) is responsible for loading the FPGA image and binaries.

Connect the MPS3 to your host computer using the USB port. You should see a USB connection exposing a Mass Storage (V2M-MPS3 by default).

The update requires 3 steps:

  1. Copy application files to <MPS3 device name>/SOFTWARE/.

  2. Open <MPS3 device name>/MB/HBI0309C/AN547/images.txt.

  3. Update the AN547/images.txt file as follows:

TITLE: Versatile Express Images Configuration File

[IMAGES]
TOTALIMAGES: 1 ;Number of Images (Max: 32)

IMAGE0ADDRESS: 0x01000000 ;Please select the required executable program

IMAGE0FILE: \SOFTWARE\zephyr.elf

Reset the board, and you should see the following message on the corresponding serial port:

Hello World! mps3_an547

FVP Usage

To run with the FVP, first set environment variable ARMFVP_BIN_PATH before using it. Then you can run it with west build -t run.

export ARMFVP_BIN_PATH=/path/to/fvp/directory
west build -t run

QEMU Usage

To run with QEMU instead of the default FVP, override the emulator selection at build time via:

$ west build -b mps3_an547 samples/hello_world -DEMU_PLATFORM=qemu -t run

Note, however, that the Ethos-U55 NPU is not available in QEMU. If you require the use of the NPU, please use the default FVP for device emulation.