ARM Versatile Express Cortex-A57 Soft Macrocell Model

An SMM is a Soft Macrocell Model which is an FPGA implementation of an ARM processor, built with ARM development boards. Life with an SMM, would be much easier, at least from an engineer's perspective. The use of FPGA technology enables us to provide boards containing fully functional, tested examples of the newest ARM processors well before any hard silicon devices are available from a foundry.  The binary image is protected by the FPGA's built-in encryption mechanism, so the addition of any custom peripheral IP would require an extra LogicTile to be added to the development system. SMM's are used within ARM as part of the validation process of new processors, CoreLink™ and CoreSight™ components. This small part of the validation process is vital to flush out any issues with a design. A SMM allows a software engineer to run an operating system on early release of RTL to both shorten the design cycle and potentially highlight issue with drivers so less time is spent on Silicon bring up and that's good for everybody.

SMMs vary in complexity, some as just a core with no memory subsystem, allowing the user to implement their subsystem in an emulator and some are more like SoC designs which contain interrupt, memory and DMA controllers, the later allow you to start writing code straight out of the box, which is great. SMMs are normally designed to allow early hardware access to the latest ARM technology or if there is no silicon based development platform. Engineers can make their own SMMs to match closely their target SoC, however designing a good SMM can be time consuming and difficult to debug in FPGA. For this reason ARM tries to fill some of the gaps between early RTL and Silicon being available so you don't have too. A good example is the SMM for ARM® Cortex®-A57 which I will go into more detail.

  The Soft Macrocell Model (SMM) for Cortex-A57 is an encrypted FPGA image for use on the LogicTile Expess 20MG offering:

• Early Access to the Cortex-A57 processor (LAC)
• Benchmarking capability
• Early device driver, software development and validation
• User IP proving via second FPGA board
• ARM JTAG and Trace connectors for debug support with the DS-5 Development Studio

SMMs use the Versatile™ Express family development boards which provide an excellent environment for prototyping the next generation of system-on-chip designs. It's got a range of plug-in options so hardware and software applications can be developed and debugged. The SMM-A57 implementation uses standard ARM CoreLink and CoreSight components to implement a basic SoC design to mimic the testChip developments of our CoreTile Express products so you can try out Cortex-A57 in hardware and watch those LEDs blink with confidence and watch the Penguins appear on the screen.

The SMM is available now and datasheets and user guide is available here.