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Showing posts from December, 2019

Ada on a CM33

The CM33 About 2 years ago, ARM released the CM33 to silicon designers. It is designed for IoT but it has a myriad of options that the silicon designer (SD) can choose from. So, at its core its just another CM series processor not unlike a CM4/CM4F/CM7. What differentiates it to a SD are the choices that allow the main extension and security extensions (aka TrustZone). When both of these options are in place and selected by the end user, the CPU looks at one moment like two CM4Fs one secure and one not secure. Of course, the program counter can only be one place at one time so whilst it may indeed look like two cores, only one is really there and it is in this management of the view of the SoC from each of these two spaces that the true colour of the CPU shows. For this discussion of Ada on a CM33, we will assume the CPU starts in TrustZone mode + Main extension. This means that there are two SysTick timers, one for secure(S) and one for non-secure(NS). The CPU registers are only ba...