Skip to content

Recovering a locked TM4C

Jump to bottom
Peter Wittich edited this page Jan 28, 2020 · 18 revisions

The TM4C Tina microcontroller on the CM can lock up under certain circumstances, in such a way that the JTAG interface is no longer accessible for anything except the most basic boundary scan. You cannot use this to reload the board, for instance, nor can you debug the application. It’s not exactly clear to me how one gets into this situation, but it has happened numerous times.

One can recover the board with the SEGGER JTAG programmer with the following steps. This assumes you are using a mated SM+CM.

  1. Connect the segger to the front panel JTAG connector.
  2. Ensure that the SM does not automatically power on the CM. (as of 12/2019 this requires manipulation of the Zynq software.) This means that the MCU is held in reset since power-on.
  3. Open the JLinkExe program.
  4. Type unlock LMS3xxx 1. Don’t yet power cycle.
  5. Repeat previous step.
  6. From BUTool.exe, write 1 to the MCU to take it out of reset (CM.CM1.CTRL.ENABLE_UC)
  7. From BUTool.exe, write 0 to the MCU to return the MCU to reset (CM.CM1.CTRL.ENABLE_UC)
  8. Turn off the power on the Apollo via a hard reset. Via the ipmitool command this is achieved via
ipmitool -H 192.168.10.171 -P "" -t 0x86 mc reset cold

where -H needs the IP address of the shelf manager and 0x86 is the address of the board you want to power cycle. note this is not a graceful reboot but just cuts the power.

  1. Reprogram the board as described below.

At this point the board should be recovered. You will have to reprogram the flash. Note that this will likely also wipe the internal eeprom.

What about the JTAG jumpers?

When the MCU is really hosed the FPGAs have no power, and as such they won’t even respond to the JTAG boundary scan instruction. At this point you need to set the jumpers to take the FPGAs out of the chain and reprogram via JLinkExe.

Re-programming via JLinkExe

The command-line programmer can be invoked to program the main program and the boot loader. To call a command file you need to run JLinkExe with the -CommandFile option, e.g.,

% JLinkExe -CommandFile script.cmd

CAUTION: You must reprogram the main program before the boot loader

The relevant scripts are shown below, first, for the main program, then for the boot loader. In each case you need to set the JTagConf option, depending on which parts are in the JTAG chain. The two arguments are the length of the combined length of the IR chain before the MCU and the number of devices before the MCU. The IR register length is 12 bits for the VUXP class and 6 bits for the KUXP class of Xilinx FPGAs, and the MCU is the last device in the JTAG chain.

[wittich@axion v012]$ cat jlinkload.cmd 
// this is a command file for JLINK

log loadlog.txt
exitonerror 1

usb 
device TM4C1290NCPDT
speed auto
si jtag
//JTagConf 18,2 // KU + VU
JTagConf 0,0 // MCU only
//JTagConf 6,1 // KU only
connect
loadbin ./cm_mcu.bin,0x4000
exit

For the boot loader:

[wittich@axion v012]$ cat jlinkloadbl.cmd 
// this is a command file for JLINK

log loadbllog.txt
exitonerror 1

usb 
device TM4C1290NCPDT
speed auto
si jtag
//JTagConf 18,2 // KU + VU
JTagConf 0,0 // MCU only
//JTagConf 6,1 // KU only
connect
loadbin ./bl_main.bin,0x0
exit
Clone this wiki locally