3.6.8.2.4 Step 4 - Open Serial UART Terminals

During the setup process you will need a couple of serial UART terminals to communicate with the PolarFireSoC: one for the HSS and another for the embedded Linux command line.

Ensure the board is powered on and the board’s USB - UART Terminal connection is made as described inStep 1 - Setup Required Board Connections.
Windows Users
On Windows, To open the HSS Serial Terminal:
  1. Open Start > Device Manager. Select View > Show hidden devices. Under Ports (COM & LPT), and look for “Silicon Labs Quad CP2108 USB to UART Bridge: Interface 0 as shown below. Take note of the serial line number in parenthesis. In this case, Interface 0 is COM3. The digit could be different on your machine.
    If you encounter an issue configuring the serial connection to the board try the following:
    • If you can’t find the serial port with the correct name, you may have to install CP210x Windows Drivers from SiLabs.
    • You should be able to see the UART interfaces in StartDevice Manager. If you can’t, try selecting ViewShow hidden devices,
    • If you still can’t see the serial ports, then your USB socket could be broken, which is usually indicated if Windows makes no sound when disconnecting/reconnecting the USB cable.
  2. With the Icicle Kit on and connected, open a new PuTTY terminal. Change the settings on the left navigation panel, under ConnectionSerial to:
    • Serial line to connect to: <Serial line number>
    • Baud Rate: 115200
    • Data Bits: 8
    • Stop Bits: 1
    • Parity: None
    • Flow Control: None
    Below is an image of how the settings look in PuTTY:
  3. Go back to Session on the left navigation panel, Change Connection Type to Serial as shown below, then click Open:
Linux Users
On Linux, to open the HSS Serial Terminal:
  • The UART channel that we will connect to is channel 0. To do this in GTKTerm, the command is:

    sudo gtkterm -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 115200

  • Note that if you have other ttyUSB devices connected to your host PC, the number after /dev/ttyUSb may need to change. To out find which devices are associated with the Icicle Kit’s UART channels, you can run ls /dev/ttyUSB* with and without the USB cable connected to the board. Any new devices (there should be four) that appear when plugging in the board are the UART channels. For this step, we want to use the /dev/ttyUSB device with the lowest number.

Embedded Linux Serial Terminal

To open the Embedded Linux Serial Terminal follow the same instructions as the previous Step 4 - Open Serial UART Terminals section. Except this time use interface 1 (/dev/ttyUSB1 on a Linux host PC, and Interface 1 on a Windows host PC).

In the example below, Interface 1 is on the COM4 serial line.