Actel has a broad offering of proven and pre-implemented synthesizable IP building blocks that can be easily configured and used within Actel FPGA system-level designs. Software drivers for many Actel IP Cores are available within the Firmware Catalog. The drivers are free of charge and delivered as C source, so they can be easily compiled and linked into a user's program or executable. These drivers hide the implementation details of peripheral operations behind a driver application program interface (API), so the developer need only be concerned with the peripheral's function.
A hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that supports ARM Cortex-M1, Core8051s, and CoreMP7 processors is also available. HALs enable the software driver to be used without modification, isolating the driver's implementation from the hardware platform variations. A driver implementation interacts with the hardware peripheral it is controlling. This enables programmers to seamlessly reuse code, even when the hardware platform changes.
Software drivers and HALs are available within the Firmware Catalog.
The Firmware Catalog notifies the user if new firmware cores or firmware updates are available from Actel's repository. The updates can be downloaded into a local vault on a PC. A vault is a local directory (either local to a machine or on the local network) that contains cores downloaded from one or more repositories. The repository is a location on the web that contains firmware cores ready to be used directly in a toolchain software.
After selecting IPs to use in the Actel FPGA design, the associated firmware can be selected in the Firmware Catalog and the IP cores can be generated. The IP cores are then loaded into the code via SoftConsole, Keil Software, or IAR Systems' software development environments.
The Firmware Catalog can be configured to display multiple versions of the same core or only the latest version of the downloaded core. The graphical user interface (GUI) includes search by compatible core and filtering capabilities and provides descriptions of the firmware cores.
The Firmware Catalog can be easily configured within SoftConsole to be an integrated part of the toolchain to allow seamless location, configuration, and addition of firmware to the user's SoftConsole project.
The Firmware Catalog is packaged with Libero IDE v8.6 and is also available as a standalone installation.
