topic RT1160 Boot Procedure in i.MX RT Crossover MCUs

RT1160 Boot Procedure

andreytarakin — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 08:00:54 GMT

Hello all,

We are using a development board MIMXRT 1160-EVK.

on the board, we have a QSPI NOR flash of 64MB.

we would like to know:

1. After burning an image to the QSPI flash (via MCUXpresso IDE), how does the card boots?

2. Does it run from the flash? isn't it slow? because every instruction needs to be read from the flash memory on QSPI interface.

3. do we need an external RAM on board to run application?

Thanks.

Re: RT1170 Boot Procedure

jingpan — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:16:13 GMT

Hi @andreytarakin ,

1. Please set the board to internal boot mode. Please refer to AN12107 and AN12108.

2. RT1160 will boot from internal ROM bootloader. Then configure the FlexSPI to support XIP. At last, jump to the application in NOR flash. You can refer to AN12437 to see the performance of FlexSPI.

3. It's up to your application. RT1160 has 1M SRAM.

Regards,

Jing

Re: RT1170 Boot Procedure

andreytarakin — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 07:58:43 GMT

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

this is the memory configuration on our board:

andreytarakin_0-1658649421004.png

There is no 1MB RAM here. Is there some memory configuration we are missing?

Regards,

Andrey

Re: RT1170 Boot Procedure

Masmiseim — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 15:45:34 GMT

The 1 Megabyte is the sum of all on chip memories (DTCM, ITCM, OCRAM). You should place all performance critical code to ITCM.

“because every instruction needs to be read from the flash memory on QSPI interface.” The FlexSPI Interface has a prefetch buffer and the Core uses caches. This helps to keep the performance up even if the memory is slow.