OptiFlash Memory Technology

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Software Tools
  • Smart placement
  • Optishare
  • Overlay Manager
• SDK Drivers
  • Fast Local Copy (FLC)
  • Region Address Translation (RAT)
  • Remote L2 Cache (RL2)
  • On-the-fly-Safety and Security
  • Firmware-Update-Over-Air (FOTA)
  • Flash Controller (OSPI)

Introduction

Optiflash memory technology provides an ecosystem of silicon hardware peripherals and software tools to improve the application performance executing from external flash.

For more information, please go through the following resources:

1. TI OptiFlash Memory Technology Appnote
2. OptiFlash Tool MCU Academy
3. Technical reference manual for that particular device (eg. AM261x, AM263Px, etc).

The following image shows what Optiflash provides:

OptiFlash Technology Ecosystem

Software Tools

There are 3 software tools

Smart placement

Smart placement is a name given to a process, using which functions and other linker-placed objects are distributed across different memories, while accounting for their criticality, directly from the source code.

To get started with the smart placement, go to: Getting Started With Smart Placement

For detailed understanding on how smart placement work, go to: Smart Placement

Optishare

The Optishare tool is used to remove redundant code in multicore projects.

Read more on this at Optishare

Overlay Manager

Although this is not a tool as such, however, this is a technique to bring code from external memory to internal memory at runtime.

Please refer to Sram Overlay Benchmark to see how to implement this.

SDK Drivers

Fast Local Copy (FLC)

On how to configure, please refer to Configuring OptiFlash various IP

For example,  FLC Example

Region Address Translation (RAT)

On how to configure, please refer to Configuring OptiFlash various IP

For example, RAT Example

Remote L2 Cache (RL2)

On how to configure, please refer to Configuring OptiFlash various IP

For example,  RL2 Example

On-the-fly-Safety and Security

On how to enable safety and security on an application,

1. For Safety: Enabling safety on external flash
2. For Security: Refer to Enabling secure XIP using OTFA of Enabling XIP or eXecute In Place

By default, Safety and Security is disabled. For an application, it should be enabled with special build flags as mentioned in the above links.

Firmware-Update-Over-Air (FOTA)

To enable FOTA use-case, FOTA accelerators has been added in the SOC. More can be read on this in the TRM and appnote.

How to A/B Swap? Working of bootseg IP

In the SDK, go through the following resources on how to enable FOTA use case:

S.No	SDK Component	Description Page	SDK Driver Page	Examples
1	A/B Swap	How to A/B Swap? Working of bootseg IP,	FSS,	SBL OSPI SWAP, Swap To Region B,
2	FLSOPSKD	How to use Flash Operation Scheduler Hardware,	FLSOPSKD,	FLSOPSKD Benchmark,
3	FOTA Agent		FOTA Agent,	Using FOTA Agent (FSS Switch To B),

Flash Controller (OSPI)

Here the aim is to configure the flash to work at full speed. On how to use flash, please refer to Flash