Programming 24-bit SPI Flash on a custom C5515 board.

The bulk of the documentation for programming should reside in the data sheet for the specific 24-bit SPI Flash chip that you are using.  The Flash documentation will tell you what SPI commands are needed to erase and write data.  Some Flash chips have very bizarre modes such as pages that are larger than 256 bytes (e.g. 264 bytes), special high-speed write commands, or serial numbers.

You should find plenty of documentation from Texas Instruments on how the SPI port works, and how you might set compatible mode bits to facilitate communication with your Flash by matching the two specifications.  Basically, you need to compare the data sheets from both chips (DSP & Flash) and find the commonalities.

Hi Brian,

I did find a bin file that seems to do the job, but somewhat difficult to find. The particular SPI flash we are using is 100% SPI compatible and with the programmer.out we now use, and the program is loaded without any problems. Basically it all works as before when we were using the 512Kbit EEPROM with the VC5505. The extra addressing space for the SPI flash is really welcomed !!

One thing though, I'd love to add some lines of source code that are specific to our custom modules so as to facilitate the flashing of the bin code. Unfortunately there does not seem to exist a source code for the programmer.out that we now use, that could be adapted to one's needs - but mind you, there are plenty of different versions of programmer.out. so somebody out there must have a fairly recent version of the source code of this little program - programmer.out ??

I never used any Spect. Dig. eval boards and in any case the SPI flash we use does NOT work with the Spect Dig version of the programmer.out software that was suggested on this blog ... our requirements were a little different.

Cheers, M

I wrote my own Flash erase+write code based on the data sheets.  You should be able to do the same without the programmer.out source, provided you have an in-house firmware developer.  Unfortunately, the code that I wrote is not freely available, as it was written for a client.  It's not that tough: You just send and receive bytes over SPI just like the Flash data sheet documents.

Brian Willoughby said:

I wrote my own Flash erase+write code based on the data sheets.  You should be able to do the same without the programmer.out source, provided you have an in-house firmware developer.  Unfortunately, the code that I wrote is not freely available, as it was written for a client.  It's not that tough: You just send and receive bytes over SPI just like the Flash data sheet documents.

Hi Brian,

Sounds good ! Good on you ! I'll look into that solution if there is no other ... unfortunately our developers are too busy with protocols, real-time firmware development and testing & validation of the application's code. We could not justify the time to do it at this point in time. Forgive my presumptions but it was natural to expect that the same (or equivalent) software would exist for the C5515. But yes, your right, I totally agree, its always better to create your own IP and use it in your own products, than to just give it away to a client (no matter how charming he/she may be). It turns out that what I wanted to do is possible with a simple GEL script that can be executed after the programmer.out terminates - so all is cool even without the source ...

Cheers & good luck,

M

Marin,

Can you try the one from this post?

http://e2e.ti.com/support/dsp/tms320c5000_power-efficient_dsps/f/109/p/68376/334178.aspx#334178

Regards,

Peter Chung