Firmware Catalog

Microsemi has a broad offering of proven and pre-implemented synthesizable IP building blocks that can be easily configured and used within Microsemi FPGA system-level designs. Software drivers for many Microsemi IP Cores are available within the Firmware Catalog. The drivers are free of charge and delivered as C source, so they can be easily compiled and linked into a user's program or executable. These drivers hide the implementation details of peripheral operations behind a driver application program interface (API), so the developer need only be concerned with the peripheral's function.

A hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that supports ARM Cortex-M3, Cortex-M1 and Core8051s processors is also available. HALs enable the software driver to be used without modification, isolating the driver's implementation from the hardware platform variations. A driver implementation interacts with the hardware peripheral it is controlling. This enables programmers to seamlessly reuse code, even when the hardware platform changes.

The Firmware Catalog notifies the user if new firmware cores or firmware updates are available from Microsemi's web repository. The updates can be downloaded into a local vault on a PC. A vault is a local directory (either local to a machine or on the local network) that contains cores downloaded from one or more repositories. The repository is a location on the web that contains firmware cores ready to be used directly in any toolchain software.

After selecting IPs to use in the Microsemi FPGA design, the associated firmware can be selected in the Firmware Catalog and the IP cores can be generated. The IP cores are then loaded into the code via SoftConsole, Keil, or IAR Systems software development environments.

For the SmartFusion design flow, the designer does not need to determine which firmware must be selected and generated. Although the designer can browse the complete listing of firmware in the Firmware Catalog, the SmartDesign flow for SmartFusion2 and SmartFusion SoC FPGAs searches the design for instantiated IP and automatically presents the appropriate firmware.

Firmware Catalog User Interface

The Firmware Catalog is configured within SoftConsole so that it is integrated in the toolchain, which allows seamless location, configuration, and addition of firmware to the user's SoftConsole project.