What is the flow in SOC

[ashishk]

Hi,

I am a verification guy mostly worked into IP level. I wanted to know what is the typical flow of SOC. I mean when chip is out of reset, then normally what is done. How is firmware loaded and what are processes started. I heard someone saying that processor will boot, then my question will be what does this means. What happens during processor booting. So lets say on SOC level if I want to see one transaction from SPI master(peripheral) then what all to be done before i can initiate this.

Thanks,
Ashish

 

[chipmonkey]

I can try to xplain this in contxt of an ARM SoC..

once the Soc reset is deasserted, the ARM starts booting. While Booting ARM jumps to the location 0x00 which is the reset vector location. From there It loads each instrucrtion from ROM one by one.. you can observe the Addresses fetched by ARM by observing the AXI/AHB read interface of ARM. The boot sequence commonly contains instructions for enabling interrupts, setting pagetables etc

 

[ashishk]

Can you please tell what all things are part of your boot sequence apart from setting up interrupt/exception handlers , and pagetables . And what should be the next step after this booting is done.

 

[wsong0210]

after pagefile, will be bootloader.
The bootloader will load the image of OS into the memory.
Then bootloader start the OS and handle over the control to OS
OS will start, load all drivers, and then suppose you can communicate with the processor using SPI or whatever.

If there is no OS, hard to say wha happen.
It is possible that bootloader will be the control all the time and drivers, communication interfaces are directly built in bootloader.