Nios® V/II Embedded Design Suite (EDS)
Support for Embedded Development Tools, Processors (SoCs and Nios® V/II processor), Embedded Development Suites (EDSs), Boot and Configuration, Operating Systems, C and C++
12693 Discussions

bootloader in tightly coupled memory

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
1,255 Views

I have the following tightly coupled memories 

 

6k tightly coupled memory connected to cpu tightly coupled instruction master and 

cpu data master, the reset and exception address are located in this memory 

 

2k tightly coupled memory connected to tightly coupled data master 

 

The 6k instruction tcm is initialized with a hex file that contains a bootloader. The bootloader waits for an update request from a pc after reset (it does not enable interrupts). If this times out it just jumps to the flash and executes the content. The flash content is generated with elf2flash and the boot copier. The program stored in flash uses the 6k tcm for irq handlers, the 2k data tcm as a seperate irq stack and sdram/sram for everything else. Besides the system has a 4k data cache and a 4k instruction cache. 

 

Before using tightly coupled memory I had just one 8k normal onchip memory for the bootloader and the irq stuff of the main application was in sdram. This setup worked without any problems. 

 

With the tightly coupled memories I could successfully start the bootloader in the 6k tcm from the IDE with Run as. Then flash content was uploaded and then excuted in the sdram and the tcms. However it fails to work stand-alone (just switching the device on). It does not respond to an upload request nor does it excute a program that is stored in flash memory. 

Can this be an issues with the generated hex files? 

 

I am using the latest quartus web edition 5.1 (db patch) and nios2 5.1 eval (still waiting for my updates)
0 Kudos
1 Reply
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
402 Views

Hi Orsino: 

 

Have you recomplie QuartusII project after finish debugging, so that the content in tcm.hex can be integrated into *.sof. 

 

FYI. 

 

regards, 

David
0 Kudos
Reply