Hello together, I am little bit confused regarding to the Cortex-M0DS comparability to Altera FPGAs.
On one hand, according to the information out of the white paper An introduction to ARM Cortex-M0 Design Start it must be possible to run the Cortex-M0 DS on an Altera FPGA because the DesignStart DesignKit deliver a synthesizable Verilog Version of the processor.
On the other hand till now I only find Master Thesis or Step by Step Guides like (STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING THE CORTEX-M0 USING A NEXYS2 FPGA BOARD) which uses development boards based on Xilinx FPGAs.
So my questions are:
Thank you and best regards
Stefan
To help answer your questions, ARM ported CM0-DesignStart to our own FPGA board called MPS2 (which was then superseded by a larger FPGA capacity version called MPS2+). The reason we used this board was it was already available before we released CM0-DesignStart and we had previously ported other Cortex-M cores to that platform. (This platform is Altera based). see www.arm.com/mps
On the MPS2+ platform we partitioned the FPGA into 2 sections (1) CPU+ debug, which is fixed+encrypted and (2) User area, which is modifiable.
You could take the Cortex-M0 netlist from the CM0-DesignStart simulation world and target any FPGA technology (Xilinx or Altera) , ARM choose our own FPGA platform. The key difference here is if you take the netlist from the simulation world it would not have any debug, debug (my this I mean JTAG interface) is only available on the MPS2+ platform.
As Joseph mention below we have step by step guides for our platform, but not for generic FPGA platforms, however saying that some engineers have used their initiative and ported CM0-DesignStart to other platforms, like the one you mentioned above and I also saw someone was working on porting CM0-DesignStart to Digilient's Arty FPGA board (Xilinx based). We don't have guides for these platforms as the work was not done by us.
Hope that makes sense.
Liam