uhd/firmware/fx3

INSTRUCTIONS

Building the B2xx FX3 Firmware

The USRP B200 and B210 each use the Cypress FX3 USB3 PHY for USB3 connectivity. This device has an ARM core on it, which is programmed in C. This README will show you how to build our firmware and bootloader source.

A brief "Theory of Operations": The host sends commands to the FX3, our USB3 PHY, which has an on-board ARM which runs the FX3 firmware code (hex file). That code is responsible for managing the transport from the host to the FPGA by configuring IO and DMA.

Setting up the Cypress SDK

In order to compile the USRP B200 and B210 firmware, you will need the FX3 SDK distributed by the FX3 manufacturer, Cypress Semiconductor. You can download the FX3 SDK from here Note: You must use SDK version 1.2.3!

Once you have downloaded it, extract the ARM cross-compiler from the tarball ARM_GCC.tar.gz and put it somewhere useful. The highest level directory you need is arm-2013.03/.

Now that you have extracted the cross compilation toolchain, you need to set up some environment variables to tell the B2xx makefile where to look for the tools. These variables are:

    $ export ARMGCC_INSTALL_PATH=<your path>/arm-2013.03
    $ export ARMGCC_VERSION=4.5.2

Now, you'll need to set-up the Cypress SDK, as well. In the SDK, copy the following sub-directories from the firmware directory to uhd.git/firmware/fx3: common/, lpp_source/, u3p_firmware/, boot_fw/. In addition, copy the elf2img sub-directory from the util directory to uhd.git/firmware/fx3.

Your directory structure should now look like:

uhd.git/
       |
       --firmware/
                 |
                 --fx3/
                      |
                      --b200/               # From UHD
                      --boot_fw/            # From Cypress SDK
                      --common/             # From Cypress SDK
                      --elf2img/            # From Cypress SDK
                      --gpif2_designer/     # From UHD
                      --lpp_source/         # From Cypress SDK
                      --u3p_firmware/       # From Cypress SDK
                      --README.md           # From UHD

Applying the Patch to the Toolchain

Now, you'll need to apply a patch to a couple of files in the Cypress SDK. Head into the common/ directory you just copied from the Cypress SDK, and apply the patch b200/fx3_mem_map.patch.

    # cd uhd.git/firmware/fx3
    $ patch -p1 < ../b200/fx3_mem_map.patch

If you don't see any errors print on the screen, then the patch was successful.

Building the Firmware

Now, you should be able to head into the b200/firmware directory and simply build the firmware:

    $ cd uhd.git/firmware/fx3/b200/firmware
    $ make

It will generate a usrp_b200_fw.hex file, which you can then give to UHD to program your USRP B200 or USRP B210.

Building the Bootloader

The bootloader is built in the b200/bootloader directory:

    $ cd uhd.git/firmware/fx3/b200/bootloader
    $ make

It will generate a usrp_b200_bl.img file, which you can supply as an argument to b2xx_fx3_utils to load it onto the device.