boards/ti/am243x_evm/doc/index.rst
.. zephyr:board:: am243x_evm
Overview
The AM243x EVM is a development board that is based of a AM2434 SoC. The Cortex R5F cores in the SoC run at 800 MHz. The board also includes a flash region, DIP-Switches for the boot mode selection and 2 RJ45 Ethernet ports.
See the TI TMDS243EVM Product Page_ for details.
Hardware
The AM2434 SoC has 2 domains. A MAIN domain and a MCU domain. The MAIN domain consists of 4 R5F cores and the MCU domain of one M4F core.
Zephyr currently supports the following cores:
The board physically contains:
Memory.
Debug
This board configuration uses a system clock frequency of
The board has 2GB of DDR RAM available. This board configuration allocates:
This board configuration uses by default:
.. zephyr:board-supported-hw::
Flashing
The boot process of the AM2434 SoC requires the booting image to be in a specific format and to wait for the internal DMSC-L of the AM2434 to start up and configure memory firewalls. Since there exists no Zephyr support it's required to use one of the SBL bootloader examples from the TI MCU+ SDK.
The following steps are from the time this documentation was written and might change in the future. They also target Linux with assumption some basic things (like python3 and openssl) are installed.
You might also want to take a look at the Bootflow Guide_ for more details.
To build these you need to install the TI MCU+ SDK. To do this you need to
follow the steps described in the mcupsdk-core repository, which includes
cloning the repositories with west. It's recommended to use another Python venv
for this since the MCU+ SDK has own Python dependencies that could conflict with
Zephyr dependencies. You can replace all/dev.yml in the west init
command with am243x/dev.yml, if you want to clone a few less repositories.
You also need to follow the "Downloading And Installing Dependencies" section
but you need to replace all am263x occurrences in commands with am243x.
Please also take note of the tools and mcu_plus_sdk install path. The
tools install path will later be referred to as $TI_TOOLS and the MCU+
SDK path as $MCUPSDK. You can pass --skip_doxygen=true and
--skip_ccs=true to the install script since they aren't needed. You might
encounter a error that a script can't be executed. To fix it you need to mark it
as executable with chmod +x <path> and run the download_components.sh
again.
Summarized you will most likely want to run the following commands or similar versions for setting up the MCU+ SDK:
.. code-block:: console
python3 -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip3 install west west init -m https://github.com/TexasInstruments/mcupsdk-manifests.git --mr mcupsdk_west --mf am243x/dev.yml west update ./mcupsdk_setup/am243x/download_components.sh --skip_doxygen=true --skip_ccs=true
After the script finished successfully you want to switch into the
mcu_plus_sdk directory and edit the
source/drivers/bootloader/bootloader.c file to set the entryPoint to
0 inside Bootloader_runCpu unconditionally. This is needed due to how
Zephyr builds the image currently.
Now you can build the internal libraries with the following commands:
.. code-block:: console
make gen-buildfiles DEVICE=am243x PROFILE=release make libs DEVICE=am243x PROFILE=release
If you encounter compile errors you have to fix them. For that you might have to change parameter types, remove missing source files from makefiles or download missing headers from the TI online reference.
Depending on whether you later want to boot from flash or by loading the image
via UART either the sbl_ospi or the sbl_uart example is relevant for the
next section.
The example bootloader implementation is found in the
examples/drivers/boot/<example>/am243x-evm/r5fss0-0_nortos directory.
You can either build the example by invoking make -C examples/drivers/boot/<example>/am243x-evm/r5fss0-0_nortos/ti-arm-clang/ DEVICE=am243x PROFILE=release or use the prebuilt binaries in
tools/boot/sbl_prebuilt/am243x-evm
Additionally for booting you need to convert your built Zephyr binary into a
format that the TI example bootloader can boot. You can do this with the
following commands, where $TI_TOOLS refers to the root of where your
ti-tools (clang, sysconfig etc.) are installed ($HOME/ti by default) and
$MCUPSDK to the root of the MCU+ SDK (directory called mcu_plus_sdk).
You might have to change version numbers in the commands. It's expected that the
zephyr.elf from the build output is in the current directory.
.. code-block:: bash
export BOOTIMAGE_CORE_ID_r5fss0-0=4 export BOOTIMAGE_CORE_ID_m4=14
export BOOTIMAGE_CORE_ID=${BOOTIMAGE_CORE_ID_desired-core} $TI_TOOLS/sysconfig_1.21.2/nodejs/node $MCUPSDK/tools/boot/out2rprc/elf2rprc.js ./zephyr.elf $MCUPSDK/tools/boot/xipGen/xipGen.out -i ./zephyr.rprc -o ./zephyr.rprc_out -x ./zephyr.rprc_out_xip --flash-start-addr 0x60000000 $TI_TOOLS/sysconfig_1.21.2/nodejs/node $MCUPSDK/tools/boot/multicoreImageGen/multicoreImageGen.js --devID 55 --out ./zephyr.appimage ./zephyr.rprc_out@${BOOTIMAGE_CORE_ID} $TI_TOOLS/sysconfig_1.21.2/nodejs/node $MCUPSDK/tools/boot/multicoreImageGen/multicoreImageGen.js --devID 55 --out ./zephyr.appimage_xip ./zephyr.rprc_out_xip@${BOOTIMAGE_CORE_ID} python3 $MCUPSDK/source/security/security_common/tools/boot/signing/appimage_x509_cert_gen.py --bin ./zephyr.appimage --authtype 1 --key $MCUPSDK/source/security/security_common/tools/boot/signing/app_degenerateKey.pem --output ./zephyr.appimage.hs_fs
All these steps are also present in various Makefiles in the examples/
directory of MCU+ SDK source.
After that you want to switch the bootmode to UART by switching the DIP-Switches into the following configuration:
.. list-table:: UART Boot Mode :header-rows: 1
If you want to just run the image via UART you need to run
.. code-block:: console
python3 uart_bootloader.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 --bootloader=sbl_uart.release.hs_fs.tiimage --file=zephyr.appimage.hs_fs
The uart_bootloader.py script is found in $MCUPSDK/tools/boot and the
sbl_uart.release.hs_fs.tiimage in
$MCUPSDK/tools/boot/sbl_prebuilt/am243x-evm. After sending the image your
Zephyr application will run after a 2 second long delay.
If you want to flash the image instead you have to take the OSPI example config
file from the $MCUPSDK/tools/boot/sbl_prebuilt/am243x-evm directory and
change the filepath according to your names. It should look approximately like:
.. code-block::
--flash-writer=sbl_uart_uniflash.release.hs_fs.tiimage --operation=flash-phy-tuning-data --file=sbl_prebuilt/am243x-evm/sbl_ospi.release.hs_fs.tiimage --operation=flash --flash-offset=0x0 --file=zephyr.appimage.hs_fs --operation=flash --flash-offset=0x80000 --file=zephyr.appimage_xip --operation=flash-xip
You then need to run python3 uart_uniflash.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 --cfg=<path/to/your-config-file>. The scripts and images are in the same path
as described in the UART section above.
After flashing your image you can power off your board, switch the DIP-Switches into following configuration to boot in OSPI mode and your Zephyr application will boot immediately after powering on the board.
.. list-table:: OSPI Boot Mode :header-rows: 1
Debugging
The board is equipped with an XDS110 JTAG debugger. To debug a binary, utilize
the debug build target:
.. zephyr-app-commands:: :app: <my_app> :board: am243x_evm/<soc>/<core> :maybe-skip-config: :goals: debug
.. hint::
To utilize this feature, you'll need OpenOCD version 0.12 or higher. Due to the possibility of
older versions being available in package feeds, it's advisable to build OpenOCD from source_.
Instead of using sbl_ospi from above, one may also flash sbl_null and load the
application ELFs using Code Composer Studio IDE to individual cores and run/debug
the application. Note that this does not require converting the Zephyr ELF to another
forma, making development much easier.
References
AM64x/AM243x EVM Technical Reference Manual: https://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/spruim2
MCU+ SDK Github repository: https://github.com/TexasInstruments/mcupsdk-core
.. _Bootflow Guide: https://software-dl.ti.com/mcu-plus-sdk/esd/AM64X/latest/exports/docs/api_guide_am64x/BOOTFLOW_GUIDE.html
.. _TI TMDS243EVM Product Page: https://www.ti.com/tool/TMDS243EVM
.. _build OpenOCD from source: https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/ti/k3.html#building-openocd-from-source
License
This document Copyright (c) Siemens Mobility GmbH
This document Copyright (c) 2025 Texas Instruments
SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0