AN 796: Cyclone® V and Arria® V SoC Device Design Guidelines

ID 683360
Date 3/30/2022
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.1.2.2. Bare Metal

The HPS can be used in a bare-metal configuration (without an OS) and Intel® offers the HWLibs (Hardware Libraries) that consist of both high-level APIs, and low-level macros for most of the HPS peripherals.

However, to use a bare metal application for the HPS, you must be familiar with developing run time capabilities to ensure that your bare metal application makes efficient use of resources available in your MPU subsystem.

For example:
  • A typical bare-metal application uses only a single core, you must develop run time capabilities to manage process between both cores and the cache subsystem if you want to fully utilize the MPU subsystem.
  • As your application increases in complexity you may need to build capabilities to manage and schedule processes, handle inter-process communication and synchronize between events within your application.

Even a small, lightweight RTOS offers simple scheduling, inter-process communication and interrupt handling capabilities that make efficient use of the resources in the MPU subsystem.