2 SAM-BA Loader
SAM-BA is the tool designed for Microchip MPUs to:
- Customize the boot sequence
- Enable the Secure Boot mode
- Securely provision a customer key (and optionally an RSA root certificate hash) into the device fuses or OTP
- Program a bootstrap and application on external Flash memories connected to the device
The main update in SAM-BA v3.5 eases the customer key provisioning for SAMA5D2 and SAMA5D3 products, where different ciphered files must be sent depending on the version of the ROM code.
When a device family needs different files depending on its targeted version, Secure SAM-BA Cipher tool generates all the required files automatically and adds an appropriate suffix.
Then, all output files must be copied without renaming into the directory to be used by SAM-BA tool.
SAM-BA automatically selects the right file to be sent to the target by autodetecting the version of the connected device.
To ease the transition from SAM-BA 3.x to SAM-BA 3.5, and minimize the modification in existing scripts, only a single command line is required. SAM-BA automatically reads the device version and sends the correct file.
As an example, for the SAMA5D3 family, the customer-key command of
Secure SAM-BA Cipher generates two output files, named
customer-key_sama5d3x.cip and
customer-key_sama5d3x_nk.cip, respectively.
Both must be copied into the folder where the SAM-BA tool can find them. It then selects
the correct file when executing the write-customer-key command.
For those devices that do not require multiple files, only one is generated as for the previous Secure SAM-BA Cipher versions.
Command line examples are provided in the sections that follow.