Hi Laurent,
Laurent Pinchart wrote on Friday, March 02, 2007 1:35 PM:
If programming speed is the only reason for your two-step approach, then IMO this is not reasonable. It would be a waste of your time. Use a faster JTAG programmer instead. Or you could buy the flashes preprogrammed.
Buying the flashes preprogrammed is not an option given the quantities.
OK. But it seems, that the quantities are high enough, that a minute ore two more programming time does matter :-)
We already have a BDI2000 which has issues programming the flash using the workspace, so it reverts to the slow pure JTAG mode. I still have to investigate this directly with Abatron, we haven't found a solution so far.
I know workspace problems from our projects. Nearly always a wrong board (SDRAM) settup was the reason. The Abatron support is very helpful, though.
Even using the internal workspace, the BDI2000 is not a very practical solution, as it wouldn't be easy to integrate it in our test bench architecture. The price is also an issue. This is why I was looking for another solution. The alternative I thought of is using a pure JTAG programmer (slow) with a tiny ethernet-enabled boot loader. The Freescale JTAG commands used to control the processor are not documented, so I can't develop a faster JTAG-only alternative. Are you aware of any other solution ?
Possibly it makes sense to program the Flashes before soldering (with a chip programmer)? This shouldn't be faster as a BDI2000 with a working) workspace configuration, but maybe cheaper?
Sorry, don't have other ideas.
Regards, Martin