A software infrastructure for firmware-software interaction: The case of TPMs

The Low Frequency Aperture Array (LFAA) component of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) involves the processing of 2
¹⁸
signal chains, which will be performed on custom FPGA boards, the Tile Processing Module (TPM). These TPMs, as well as firmware running on them, need to be managed, monitored and controlled by the rest of the system. This requires access to on-board devices and registers on running firmware. This paper presents the software framework which has been developed to automatically generate VHDL code that exposes information on the memory map of running firmware, as well as a flexible software infrastructure for interacting with the board.