Introduction

This document describes the eXecute-In-Place (XIP) from serial Flash memory feature on MPUs and discusses the implementation of an application using the MPLAB® Harmony v3 software framework. It explains how to generate an application binary to execute in the serial Flash memory region, and it also shows how to execute an application from the serial Flash. The purpose of this feature is to provide an option to run a DDR-less system on MPUs.

The example provided in this application note comprises the six main steps listed below. These steps are detailed in 3 Serial Flash XIP Example Using MPLAB Harmony v3:

1. SAM-BA® installation on Windows host
2. Device setup to Flash using SAM-BA
3. Configure the first stage bootloader(ROMBOOT) to boot from the serial Flash memory
4. Configure the second stage bootloader(at91bootstrap) to enable XIP
5. Modification required to execute a Harmony application from QSPI
6. Debug an application on MPLAB or run an application executed from serial Flash