Is there any way to use FLASH memory as RAM in IMX RT1170

[Ragnar]

Hello NXP,

            To reduce the size of my custom board as per the requirement, I want use the flash memory as ram  in order to meet the ram requirement of the applications that includes the camera and LCD which requires large data buffers. So I want to know the following.

Q1. Is there any way to convert and use the external flash present on the board as ram ?

Q2. If so can you provide me the base example code ?. Which will be helpful.

Q3.Else are there any other ways to run the camera streaming and LCD applications without the external       SDRAM?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Regards,

Ragnar.

[Ragnar]

Hi @DanielRuvalcaba,

          Thanks for the timely response. I'm afraid that I don't know what changes or modifications have to be done to the linker scripts. To link the above-mentioned buffers to the flash. Could you please share some references for doing that?

Thanks & Regards,

     Ragnar.

[DanielRuvalcaba]

Hi,

I’m sorry if I wasn’t very clear.

Please take a look to this article, I think this will help you a lot.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Daniel.

[Ragnar]

Hi @DanielRuvalcaba,

             Thanks for the reference provided. I have gone through the article and able to do the things mentioned there.

When __BSS is declared for the RAM region it is working fine. But when I declared the __BSS in flash region it doesn't have any effect and data buffers are not allocating.

In flash region able create the Read-only buffers only using __RODATA.

But here I want to create the Read/Write buffers in the flash region and use them as LCD/Camera Buffers.

To do what changes I have to make?  

Regards,

Ragnar.

[DanielRuvalcaba]

HI,

You can link those buffers to the flash memory by modifying the linker. Nevertheless, I don't think this will work as expected in terms of performance, since it will be slower than using RAM.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid we don't have such example in the SDK.

Regards,

Daniel.