PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit

Overview

The Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit is a PolarFire SoC FPGA based development board with a Microchip MPFS250T FPGA device. The E51 RISC-V CPU can be deployed on the mpfs_icicle board. More information can be found on the Microchip website.

Hardware

Supported Features

The mpfs_icicle board supports the hardware features listed below.

on-chip / on-board: Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
2 / 2: Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files.
vnd,foo: Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.

Programming and debugging

Building

Applications for the mpfs_icicle board configuration can be built as usual (see Building an Application):

west build -b mpfs_icicle

To build the default SMP capable variant

west build -b mpfs_icicle/polarfire/smp

Flashing

In order to upload the application to the device, you’ll need OpenOCD and GDB with RISC-V support. You can get them as a part of SoftConsole SDK. Download and installation instructions can be found on Microchip’s SoftConsole website.

With the necessary tools installed, you can connect to the board using OpenOCD. To establish an OpenOCD connection run:

sudo LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<softconsole_path>/openocd/bin \
<softconsole_path>/openocd/bin/openocd --command "set DEVICE MPFS" --file \
<softconsole_path>/openocd/share/openocd/scripts/board/microsemi-riscv.cfg

Leave it running, and in a different terminal, use GDB to upload the binary to the board. You can use the RISC-V GDB from a toolchain delivered with SoftConsole SDK.

Here is the GDB terminal command to connect to the device and load the binary:

<softconsole_path>/riscv-unknown-elf-gcc/bin/riscv64-unknown-elf-gdb \
-ex "target extended-remote localhost:3333" \
-ex "set mem inaccessible-by-default off" \
-ex "set arch riscv:rv64" \
-ex "set riscv use_compressed_breakpoints no" \
-ex "load" <path_to_executable>

Debugging

Refer to the detailed overview of Application Debugging.