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🕥 ARC EM Starter Kit

Warning

EM Starter Kit board is no longer supported. There is no guarantee that this guide will be applicable for the latest tools.

ARC EM Starter Kit

Overview

The DesignWare® ARC® EM Starter Kit is a low-cost, versatile solution enabling rapid software development, software debugging, and profiling for the ARC EM Family of processors, including the EM4, EM6, EM5D, EM7D, EM9D and EM11D cores. The ARC EM Starter Kit consists of a hardware platform, including pre-installed FPGA images of different ARC EM processor configurations with peripherals. A comprehensive suite of free and open source software is available from the https://embARC.org website for use with the board. Over fifty example applications are included to help get started quickly with developing software for ARC EM processors.

The development board is based on a Xilinx Spartan®-6 LX150 FPGA and supports a variety of hardware extensions via six 2x6 connectors supporting a total of 48 user I/O pins (plus power and ground pins) that can be used to connect components such as sensors, actuators, memories, displays, buttons, switches, and communication devices. A Digilent Pmod™ Compatible extension board containing a 4-channel 12-bit A/D converter with an I2C interface and an AC power adapter is included in the package.

ARC EM Starter Kit includes the following features:

  • Closely Coupled Memory for instructions and for data
  • 128 MByte DDR3 RAM
  • Six connectors for hardware extensions
  • Flexible selection of UART, SPI, I2C and GPIO peripherals
  • JTAG and serial console over USB
  • Standard 20-pin JTAG connector also supporting 4-wire JTAG for ARC EM processor
  • 8 Mbyte for application software available in on-board flash
  • SD-card for additional application software and data storage

Block Diagram

ARC EMSK block diagram

Connecting to the Serial Terminal

Warning

On Linux machines it may be necessary for a user to be in dialout group to successfully connect to a serial terminal. In case of "Permission denied" error try to add a user to the group:

sudo usermod -aG dialout username

Connecting to the board using USB data port allows to connect to the serial terminal over UART. You need to configure these parameters of a serial terminal to interact with the serial port:

  • baud-rate 115200
  • 8 data bits
  • 1 stop Bit

On Windows Putty or any similar software may be used for connecting to the serial terminal. You can find the port number in Device Manager in Ports (COM & LPT) section: USB Serial Port (COMx) where COMx is a value for Serial line field in Putty's. Other parameters may be set Connection → Serial menu.

On Linux minicom or other similar utilities may be used. Here is an example of command line for minicom:

minicom -8 -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyUSB1

After resetting the EMSK 2.2 you will see this output of the bootloader:

***********************************
**       Synopsys, Inc.          **
**     ARC EM Starter kit        **
**                               **
** Comprehensive software stacks **
**   available from embARC.org   **
**                               **
***********************************
Firmware   Jan 11 2016, v2.2
Bootloader Dec 29 2015, v1.1
ARC EM11D, core configuration #3 

ARC IDENTITY = 0x42
RF_BUILD = 0xc902
TIMER_BUILD = 0x10304
ICCM_BUILD = 0x804
DCCM_BUILD = 0x10804
I_CACHE_BUILD = 0x135104
D_CACHE_BUILD = 0x215104

SelfTest PASSED

Info: No boot image found

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