NOEL-ARTYA7-EX-QSG
December 2020, Version 1.2
5
www.cobhamaes.com/gaisler
2. Overview
2.1. Boards
The NOEL-ARTYA7-EX design can be used with the Digilent Arty A7 FPGA Development Board (A7-100T
version) ([RD-5]).
2.2. Design summary
The NOEL-ARTYA7-EX is a GRLIB design which includes the following features:
• Cobham Gaisler NOEL RISC-V RV64G dual-core processor
• RISC-V Debug module
• L2 cache with 256 KiB in 4 ways
• Memory controller and 256 MiB SDRAM.
• Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbit MAC interface
• APBUART serial interface
• GRLIB AMBA AHB bus controller
• JTAG, Ethernet EDCL and UART debug link
• AHB bus trace
• 20-pin GPIO controller
For more details on the NOEL-ARTYA7-EX design, see the NOEL-ARTYA7-EX User's Manual ([RD-1]). For
details about the the interfaces' connections in the board, see Chapter 3.
2.3. Processor features
• 64-bit architecture
• Hardware multiply and divide units
• Atomic instruction extension
• 32/64 bit floating point extensions using non-pipelined area efficient FPU or high-performance fully pipelined
IEEE-754 FPU
• Machine, supervisor and user mode. RISC-V standard MMU with configurable TLB.
• User level interrupts
• RISC-V standard PLIC (platform interrupt controller)
• RISC-V standard PMP (physical memory protection)
• RISC-V standard external debug support
• Advanced 7-stage dual-issue in-order pipeline
• Dynamic branch prediction, branch target buffer and return address stack
• Four full ALUs, two of them late in the pipeline to reduce stalls
• Separate instruction and data L1 cache (Harvard architecture) with snooping
2.4. Software Development Environment
2.4.1. RTEMS
RTEMS is a hard Real Time Operating System.
The NOEL-V software development environment includes an RTEMS kernel, BSP tool chain and examples. This
allows for development of real-time multitasking applications with POSIX support. The RTEMS tool chain is
currently provided for the Linux 64-bit host operating systems.
Chapter 5 describes how to use RTEMS with NOEL-ARTYA7-EX.
The recommended method to load software onto NOEL-ARTYA7-EX is by connecting to a debug interface of
the board through the GRMON hardware debugger (Chapter 4).
