CalmRISC/CalmRISC32 Samsung CalmRISC32 Core Evaluation Board

Overview

The Samsung CalmRISC32 evaluation platform consists of two boards connected by a ribbon cable. One board contains the CPU core and memory. The other board is called the MDSChip board and provides the host interface. The calmRISC32 is a harvard architecture with separate 32-bit program and data addresses. The instruction set provides no instruction for writing to program memory. The MDSChip board firmware (called CalmBreaker) provides a pseudo register interface so that code running on the core has access to a serial channel and a mechanism to write to program memory. The serial channel is fixed at 57600-8-N-1 by the firmware. The CalmBreaker firmware also provides a serial protocol which allows a host to download a program and to start or stop the core board.

The following RedBoot configurations are supported:

Configuration	Mode	Description	File
ROM	[ROM]	RedBoot running via the MDSChip board.	redboot_ROM.ecm

Initial Installation Method

The calmRISC32 core is controlled through the MDSChip board. There is no non-volatile storage available for RedBoot, so RedBoot must be downloaded to the board on every power cycle. A small utility program is used to download S-record files to the eval board. Sources and build instructions for this utility are located in the RedBoot sources in: packages/hal/calmrisc32/ceb/current/support

To download the RedBoot image, first press the reset button on the MDSChip board. The green 'Run' LED on the core board should go off. Now, use the utility to download the RedBoot image with:

$ calmbreaker -p /dev/term/b --reset --srec-code -f redboot.elf

Note that the '-p /dev/term/b' specifies the serial port to use and will vary from system to syetm. The download will take about two minutes. After it finishes, start RedBoot with:

$ calmbreaker -p /dev/term/b --run

The 'Run' LED on the core board should be on. Connecting to the MDSboard with a terminal and typing enter should result in RedBoot reprinting the command prompt.

Special RedBoot Commands

None.

Special Note on Serial Channel

The MDSChip board uses a relatively slow microcontroller to provide the pseudo-register interface to the core board. This pseudo-register interface provides access to the serial channel and write access to program memory. Those interfaces are slow and the serial channel is easily overrun by a fast host. For this reason, GDB must be told to limit the size of code download packets to avoid serial overrun. This is done with the following GDB command:

(gdb) set download-write-size 25

Rebuilding RedBoot

These shell variables provide the platform-specific information needed for building RedBoot according to the procedure described in Chapter 3:

export TARGET=calm32_ceb
export ARCH_DIR=calmrisc32
export PLATFORM_DIR=ceb

The names of configuration files are listed above with the description of the associated modes.