Emulation Baseboard

The Versatile™ Emulation Baseboard (EB) is the foundation for a highly modular development system. The EB provides all of the standard peripherals, memory and bus infrastructure. All of these elements are contained within the baseboard FPGA, which makes it possible to reconfigure the system to support different ARM processors and bus standards.

 

The EB itself contains no ARM processor, so it must always be used in conjunction with a CPU daughterboard. ARM has produced a wide range of CoreTiles for this purpose. It is also possible to place the system processor in an FPGA, which is normally done which there is no test chip available for a given CPU type. This is known as a Soft Macro Model (SMM).

 

Upon delivery, the baseboard is programmed by the user with the specific FPGA image that supports the chosen ARM core. Standard binary images, top-level RTL source code and FPGA project files are supplied with the board on the product CD-ROM, in the form of Application Notes. This allows an FPGA developer to scrutinize and modify the baseboard FPGA functionality if required.