topic NAND FLASH XIP and boot modes in i.MX RT Crossover MCUs

NAND FLASH XIP and boot modes

ahmedhrabi — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 12:50:59 GMT

Hi all,

I'am working on the IMXRT1176 and i have some questions about the memory usage :

Did the XIP support NAND flash through QSPI?
If the IMXRT1170 boot from NAND flash, then the loader must copy the application to external or internal SDRAM. Our application will for sure exceed the OCRAM, so it will be copied to the external SDRAM, so is the debug functionnal for an application that is copied from NAND falsh to SDRAM?
Is there any SDK example for that use?
Can i split the NAND flash on two partitions :
- First partition for the application code
- Second partition will be formatted as FAT32 file system

Regards,

HRABI.

Re: NAND FLASH XIP and boot modes

jay_heng — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 03:07:34 GMT

1. NAND device cannot support XIP feature.

2. BootROM will help to copy your image from NAND to SDRAM, then boot application. For SDRAM init, you need to enable DCD.

3. You can refer to below SDK demo (sdram_text debug build), but need to modify linker file for boot. and flash this image by MCUBootUtility

\SDK_2.11.1_MIMXRT1170-EVK\boards\evkmimxrt1170\demo_apps\hello_world

4. Yes, you can.

Re: NAND FLASH XIP and boot modes

ahmedhrabi — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 07:46:10 GMT

@jay_heng,

Thank you for this responses, can you please give me more informations about thus two points :

I'am a little bit confused about the BootROM, it is an accessible application and how can i modify it to copy the user aplication from NAND to external SDRAM? Is there any example of BootROM application?
For the 3rd point, If I have understood correctly, i canno't debug the image application. And i have absolutly to use the MCUbootUtility to download the image on NAND Flash, is this true?

Regards,

HRABI.

Re: NAND FLASH XIP and boot modes

jay_heng — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 09:06:22 GMT

1. You can refer to System Boot chapter in Reference Manual for more detail of BootROM

2. You can debug application in SDRAM by debugger directly, SDRAM init work will be done by debugger/IDE script. in this case, application cannot boot after power-up

Re: NAND FLASH XIP and boot modes

pguan — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:51:51 GMT

1） According to the requirements，I modified the SCF file according to following

#define m_interrupts_start 0x80002000
#define m_interrupts_size 0x000023FF

#define m_text_start 0x80002400
#define m_text_size 0x001FFFFF

2） And add the following to marco.

XIP_BOOT_HEADER_ENABLE=1,

XIP_BOOT_HE

ADER_DCD_ENABLE=1

3) Generate the image.

4) Using the NXP-MCUBootUtility to download the iamge.

DEV UNSIGNED IMAGE BOOT.

5) Cannot run. ( but MDK debug is OK.)