Arduino Bootloader On Xilinx Arm Cortex Core?

[hal9001]

Hi all,

I stumbled upon the free Arm Cortex cores for Xilinx FPGAs https://www.arm.com/resources/free-arm-cortex-m-on-fpga.
Is there a way to flash the Arduino bootloader on the cortex core such that firmware can be uploaded to the core over serial using Arduino IDE?


Cheers!

[ataradov]

This is just the core, you have to build the rest of the system to even get the serial port or any sort of memory. Once you build the system, you will have to port the bootloader, assuming that you are not going to implement the exact peripherals already supported by the bootloaders.

There are no flash memories in the the FPGA, but you can use initialized BRAMs with the bootloader binary. The uploaded Arduino image would still be volatile and will disappear on power cycle. If you want it to be persistent, then you will have to use outside flash memory and connect that to the core.

[asmi]

There are no flash memories in the the FPGA, but you can use initialized BRAMs with the bootloader binary. The uploaded Arduino image would still be volatile and will disappear on power cycle. If you want it to be persistent, then you will have to use outside flash memory and connect that to the core.

Any FPGA board typically contains a flash memory used to store a bitstream, in most cases there is some leftover storage where you can store your custom code. If that is not enough, then yeah - you will have to connect more memory.

[hal9001]

This is just the core, you have to build the rest of the system to even get the serial port or any sort of memory. Once you build the system, you will have to port the bootloader, assuming that you are not going to implement the exact peripherals already supported by the bootloaders.

There are no flash memories in the the FPGA, but you can use initialized BRAMs with the bootloader binary. The uploaded Arduino image would still be volatile and will disappear on power cycle. If you want it to be persistent, then you will have to use outside flash memory and connect that to the core.

Is there a bootloader for a existing Cortex m1 microcontroller that I can use if the Cortex core is set up identically as th microcontroller hardware?

[ataradov]

There are no microcontrollers with Cortex-M1 core, only Cortex-M0(+).

I don't really understand the question. In general, there are a lot of different bootloaders for different MCUs. But if you want it to work with Arduino, then you need to use Arduino bootloader. There is one for Atmel SAM D21, for sure.

In reality, it is way easier to port the bootloader than match the hardware behaviour. Way easier.