RZ/A3M Evaluation Kit

Overview

The EK-RZ/A3M evaluation kit enables users to easily evaluate the features of the RZ/A3M MPU. This kit includes an EK-RZ/A3M board, 5-inch 720x1280 pixel LCD MIPI graphics expansion board, and USB cables, allowing the seamless evaluation of high-definition human machine interface (HMI), camera input through USB, and more features. Equipped with an on-board J-Link debugger, users can conveniently start debugging without additional debuggers. Additionally, it also has several expansion connectors such as SDIO, PMOD,and Arduino to connect sensors, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE), allowing users to add more features without expanding the board space.

  • Special Feature Access

    • MIPI DSI 4 lanes & parallel graphics expansion ports

    • 5-inch MIPI LCD panel (720x1280 pixels)

    • USB High-Speed Host & Device

    • 32MB External QSPI NOR Flash

    • 128MB External QSPI NAND Flash

    • External sound codec

    • External RTC

  • MPU Native Pin Access

    • R9A07G066M04GBG MPU

    • 1GHz, Arm Cortex®-A55 core w/NEON extension

    • Built-in 128MB DDR3L DRAM

    • 128KB SRAM w/ECC

    • 244 pins, BGA package

    • Native pin access

    • MPU & USB current measurement

  • Ecosystem & System Control Access

    • USB High-Speed Host & Device

    • 5V input through USB (Debug, HS, USB-PD) or external power supply

    • Debug on-board (Segger J-Link®)

    • Debug external (SWD & JTAG)

    • SCIF download (SWD)

    • 3 user LEDs & 2 user buttons

    • 2 SeeedGrove® system (I2C & analog)

    • 2 Digilent Pmod™ (I2C, SPI or UART selectable)

    • Arduino™ (Uno R3)

    • MikroElektronika™ mikroBUS

    • SparkFun® Qwiic® (I2C)

    • MPU boot configuration switch

    • Audio In/Out 4-pole

    • MicroSD card slot

  • Kit Contents

    • EK-RZ/A3M board

    • MIPI graphics expansion board

    • USB cable (USB C to USB C)

    • USB cable (USB A female to USB C)

    • USB cable (USB A male to USB C)

    • Screw and spacer for fixing the sub board

Hardware

Detailed hardware features for the board can be found at:

Supported Features

The rza3m_ek 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.

rza3m_ek/r9a07g066m04gbg target

On-target memory for this board target: 126 MiB of RAM, 32 MiB of Flash.

Type

Location

Description

Compatible

CPU

on-chip

ARM Cortex-A55 CPU1

arm,cortex-a55

Clock control

on-chip

Generic fixed-rate clock provider1

fixed-clock

Display

on-chip

Renesas LCD controller1

renesas,rz-lcdc

GPIO & Headers

on-chip

Renesas RZ GPIO common1

renesas,rz-gpio-common

on-chip

Renesas RZ GPIO controller413

renesas,rz-gpio

on-board

GPIO pins exposed on Renesas MIPI lcd display headers1

renesas,rz-gpio-mipi-header

I2C

on-chip

Renesas RZ I2C controller2

renesas,rz-riic

Input

on-board

Group of GPIO-bound input keys1

gpio-keys

Interrupt controller

on-chip

ARM Generic Interrupt Controller v31

arm,gic-v3

on-chip

Renesas RZ Interrupt Controller1

renesas,rz-intc

on-chip

Renesas RZ GPIO interrupt (TINT) controller329

renesas,rz-tint

LED

on-board

Group of GPIO-controlled LEDs1

gpio-leds

MIPI-DSI

on-chip

Renesas RZ MIPI DSI host1

renesas,rz-mipi-dsi

MTD

on-board

Flash node1

soc-nv-flash

Pin control

on-chip

Below generic example shows of supported pinctrl definitions:1

renesas,rza-pinctrl

QSPI

on-chip

Renesas RZ SPIBSC1

renesas,rz-spibsc

Serial controller

on-chip

Renesas RZ SCIF UART controller14

renesas,rz-scif-uart

Timer

on-chip

per-core ARM architected timer1

arm,armv8-timer

Programming and Debugging

The rza3m_ek board supports the runners and associated west commands listed below.

flash debug rtt debugserver reset attach
jlink ✅ (default) ✅ (default) ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅

Applications for the rza3m_ek board can be built, flashed, and debugged in the usual way. See Building an Application and Run an Application for more details on building and running.

The rza3m_ek board uses Initial Program Loader (IPL) to perform initial settings and copy the Zephyr image from flash to DDR DRAM for execution. The board is shipped with the Renesas IPL already programmed, so the IPL build and flash step below, enabled with -DCONFIG_BUILD_WITH_TFA=y, is optional. It only needs to be written to flash once, so perform it only if the IPL is corrupted or has to be rewritten.

  1. For the board setup and connections, follow “3.2 Board Setup” of Getting Started with RZ/A Flexible Software Package [4].

  2. Enable the IPL build with -DCONFIG_BUILD_WITH_TFA=y. The IPL image rza3m_ek_nor_ipl.srec is generated under zephyr/build/tfa/rza3m_ek_nor/release

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rza3m_ek samples/hello_world -- -DCONFIG_BUILD_WITH_TFA=y
west flash

Note

Currently, the IPL source code can built on Linux environment only. For Windows, please follow Initial Program Loader Application Note [3]

Console

The UART port is accessed by USB Debug connector (J10).

Debugging

It is possible to load and execute a Zephyr application binary on this board on the Cortex-A55 System Core from the DDR SDRAM, using JLink debugger (J-Link Debug Host Tools).

Here is an example for building and debugging with the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rza3m_ek samples/hello_world
west debug

Flashing

Zephyr application can be flashed to Quad-SPI storage and then loaded by Initial Program Loader.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rza3m_ek samples/hello_world
west flash

References