SAMA7D65 Curiosity Kit

Overview

The EV63J76A (SAMA7D65 Curiosity Kit) is a development kit for evaluating and prototyping with Microchip SAMA7D65 microprocessor (MPU). The SAMA7D65 MPU is a high-performance ARM Cortex-A7 CPU-based embedded MPU running up to 1GHz.

The board allows evaluation of powerful peripherals for connectivity, audio and user interface applications, including MIPI-DSI and LVDS w/ 2D graphics, dual Gigabit Ethernet w/ TSN and CAN-FD. The MPUs offer advanced security functions, like tamper detection, secure boot, secure key stoarge, TRNG, PUF as well as higher-performance crypto accelerators for AES and SHA.

The SAMA7D65 series is supported by Microchip MPLAB-X development tools, Harmony V3, Linux distributions and Microchip Graphic Suite (MGS) for Linux. The SAMA7D65 is well-suited for industrial and automotive applications with graphical displays support up to WXGA/720p.

Hardware

EV63J76A provides the following hardware components:

  • Processor

    • Microchip SAMA7D65-V/4HB (SoC 343-ball TFBGA, 14x14 mm, 0.65 mm pitch)

  • Memory

    • 8 Gb DDR3L (AS4C512M16D3LA-10BIN)

    • 64 Mb QSPI NOR Flash with EUI-48 (Microchip SST26VF064BEUI-104I/MF)

    • 4Gbit SLC NAND Flash (MX30LF4G28AD-XKI)

    • 2Kb EEPROM with EUI-48 (Microchip 24AA025E48)

  • SD/MMC

    • One SD card socket, 4 bit

    • One M.2 Radio Module interface, SDIO I/F

  • USB

    • One device USB Type-C connector

    • Two host USB Type-A connectors (Microchip MIC2026-1YM)

  • Ethernet

    • One 10/100/1000 RGMII on board

    • One 10/100/1000 RGMII SODIMM add-on slot (Microchip LAN8840-V/PSA)

  • Display

    • One MIPI-DSI 34-pin FPC connector

    • One LVDS 30-pin FPC connector

  • Debug port

    • One UART Debug connector

    • One JTAG interface

  • User interaction

    • One RGB (Red, Green, Blue) LED

    • Four push button switches

  • CAN-FD

    • Three onboard CAN-FD transceivers

    • Two interfaces available on mikroBUS slots

  • Expansion

    • Raspberry Pi 40-pin GPIO connector

    • Two mikroBUS™ connectors

    • Two PIOBU/System headers

  • Power management

    • Power Supply Unit (Microchip MCP16502TAB-E/S8B)

    • Power Monitoring (Microchip PAC1934)

    • Daughter cards power supply (Microchip MIC23450-AAAYML-TR)

    • Backup power supply (CR1220 battery holder)

  • Board supply

    • System 5 VDC from USB Type-C

    • System 5 VDC from DC Jack

Supported Features

The sama7d65_curiosity board supports the hardware features listed below.

on-chip / on-board
Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
2 / 2
Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files.
vnd,foo
Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.

sama7d65_curiosity/sama7d65 target

Type

Location

Description

Compatible

CPU

on-chip

ARM Cortex-A7 CPU1

arm,cortex-a7

Clock control

on-chip

Microchip Power Management Controller (PMC)1

microchip,sam-pmc

on-chip

Microchip SAM Slow Clock Controller (SCKC)1

microchip,sama7g5-sckc

on-chip

Generic fixed-rate clock provider2

fixed-clock

Cryptographic accelerator

on-chip

Microchip G1 SHA Controller Driver1

microchip,sha-g1-crypto

I2C

on-chip

Atmel SAM Family I2C (TWI)110

atmel,sam-i2c-twi

Interrupt controller

on-chip

ARM Generic Interrupt Controller v21

arm,gic-v2

Multi-Function Device

on-chip

Microchip Flexcom (Flexible Serial Communication Unit)29

microchip,sam-flexcom

MTD

on-board

I2C EEPROMs compatible with Atmel’s AT24 family1

atmel,at24

Pin control

on-chip

Microchip SAMA7G5 Pinctrl container node1

microchip,sama7g5-pinctrl

RTC

on-chip

Microchip RTC G2 Controller1

microchip,rtc-g2

Serial controller

on-chip

Atmel SAM family USART110

atmel,sam-usart

SRAM

on-chip

Generic on-chip SRAM1

mmio-sram

System controller

on-chip

System Controller Registers R/W1

syscon

Timer

on-chip

Microchip SAM 64-bit Periodic Interval Timer (PIT64B)1

microchip,sam-pit64b

Connections and IOs

The SAMA7D65-Curiosity Kit User Guide has detailed information about board connections.

Programming

Prerequisite

Before Zephyr runs on SAMA7D65-Curiosity, at91bootstrap (the second stage bootloader for Microchip MPU) needs to run first. It will initialize the peripherals and memory controllers, download and jump to Zephyr entry point.

Loading the firmware

Using a bootloader compiled with sama7d65_curiositysd1_zephyr_defconfig configuration, the binary for Zephyr (zephyr.bin) copied to a SD card can be loaded and run on the SAMA7D65-Curiosity board.

References

SAMA7D65 Product Page:

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/sama7d65

SAMA7D65 Curiosity Kit Page:

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/EV63J76A