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Logan912's avatar
Logan912
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1 year ago

Controlling MCU with FPGA

Dear all, I’m an embedded developer having pretty good experience in MCU, and I’ve recently begun working with FPGAs. I have no prior experience working on FPGA . Current Scenario: In my design,...
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Farabi_Altera's avatar
Farabi_Altera
Icon for Regular Contributor rankRegular Contributor
1 year ago

Hello,


You may connect FPGA(eg. Cyclone V FPGA) GPIO to the MCU's RESET and BOOT0/BOOTn pins. With this setup, you can use simple FSM in verilog/vhdl to toggle these pins during startup(please make sure you take care of the timing closure).

You may use SPI/UART bridge in FPGA to forward firmware data. For starter, can try with STM32 or Renesas MCUs in bootloader mode.


regards,

Farabi


Logan912's avatar
Logan912
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
1 year ago

Thank you Farabi,

I have identified that the Cyclone V SoC FPGA includes an HPS with two UART interfaces. This allows me to physically connect UART0 to the PC application and UART1 to the MCU, so the hardware connectivity aspect is clear.

The remaining question is about the internal operation of the HPS during firmware transfer. Specifically:

  • Do I need to develop custom software to manage data movement between UART0 and UART1 (e.g., by configuring registers, memory buffers, and flow control)?

  • Or does the HPS provide a built-in mechanism to automatically handle this, essentially functioning as a UART-to-UART bridge without additional intervention?

Oh by the way I have decided to use STM for MCU as you have suggested