Friday 19 April 2013

ARM MPS system : Demo application

In this post I will cover ARM MPS system briefly. ARM MPS system in long Microcontroller Prototyping system from ARM pvt. ltd.

 From the name it is clear that this hardware development kit is used to prototype ARM micro controllers. What do we mean by prototyping is that we can make a full microcontroller with all the peripherals around it using FPGAs inside the system.

Software requirements:
1. MPS system CD come with the development kit.
2. HPE_DESK
3. Quartus
4. Keil MDK from ARM systems

There are two FPGA present in the ARM MPS system.

1. CPU FPGA
2. DUT FPGA

CPU FPGA is used to prototype processor. We do have encrypted images of arm cortex m0, m1, m3 and m4 with us  so what we do is to burn these images on the CPU FPGA using HPE_desk software.This is how we implement processor to our microcontroller.

DUT FPGA contain software image for all the peripherals that we require for our application. CPU and DUT FPGA two FPGAs are used in the system so that separating processor image from the peripheral image.
A  peripheral image can be made and can be compiled and ported to the DUT FPGA using Quartus.

Hence using this full system we can test 3rd party peripherals with required processor without licensing the processor. Hence can be used for the testing of the systems before actually making hardware.

Finally if system is ready we can execute demo application on our system using Keil MDK software. Keil MDK is used to compile and port the application code on the developed system. Here we can test our developed system by porting applications on it. We ported Blinky program and wrote text on the LCD of the MPS system.

We installed all the softwares on windows 7 platform but there are some issues which needs to be tackled while using Windows 7 otherwise if you use Windows XP then everything is working perfectly fine.  

This is just a brief introduction of MPS system otherwise it has enormous capability with it. OKay so explore yourself with the system.

Last but very important while I was executing this Demo on the system engineer from ARM Kishore Amarnath helped me to execute it on the system. All the conversation went on mobile and email. I am really grateful to him for his precious time that he helped me in sorting out the issues.

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