A while back, we described our work on implementing and testing Bluetooth communication for an NXP MCU, using Zephyr RTOS and our Renode simulation framework. That setup included an Arm Cortex-M33-based NXP MIMXRT595 MCU designed for use in constrained wireless devices.
The more recent NXP i.MX RT700 family also provides high-performance processing at low power, on top of dedicated audio and graphics peripherals, as well as AI capabilities through an integrated eIQ Neutron NPU. These features make the i.MX RT700 MCU well-suited for building AI-enabled devices such as wearables, AR glasses or smart home subsystems.
In a recent customer project, we expanded the support for NXP platforms in Renode with the i.MX RT700 MCU family. Since the MIMXRT700-EVK board was already supported in the Zephyr RTOS, we used it as a basis for our implementation. In the following paragraphs we will describe the scope of the support and illustrate it with a demo.
Renode support for the NXP i.MX RT700 MCU
Since Renode can easily incorporate the structured data provided by the Zephyr RTOS, we could leverage the existing Zephyr support for the MIMXRT700-EVK board to introduce Renode support for the platform, which simplified and accelerated the implementation process. We used our dts2repl tool to automatically generate a Renode platform file from the Zephyr device tree, which served as a starting point for further development.
Building on top of the RT500 support, the RT700 platform in Renode comes with a set of basic peripherals, like timers or flexcomm, as well as:
IMXRT700_eDMA- multi-channel direct memory access controller. Supports DMA request multiplexer.IMXRT700_SAI- serial audio interface.IMXRT700_MICFIL- PDM Microphone Interface.IMXRT700_MessagingUnit- inter-processor communication between cores.
Additionally, we provide a Robot test for the RT700 platform in Renode, which uses Zephyr to verify the implementation.
The MIMXRT700-EVK platform is also available in our System Designer portal where you can see the supported Zephyr samples, view simulation execution traces, and download assets including DTS and REPL files, Zephyr binaries, SBOM data, logs, and more.
Running the NXP i.MX RT700 MCU in Renode
To showcase the NXP i.MX RT700 MCU support in Renode, we prepared a demo that runs Zephyr I2S audio samples on MIMXRT700-EVK. To recreate it on your local machine, get the latest Renode build, then run:
renode scripts/single-node/mimxrt700_evk.rescYou will see a UART window with the following information pop up:
*** Booting Zephyr OS build v4.2.0 ***
codec sample
start streamsThe transmitted audio sample from the SAI peripheral will be saved to a separate .pcm file, which can be then visualized, as shown below:
Develop and test your NXP-based products with Renode
With support for the i.MX RT700 MCU, Antmicro has extended the pool of NXP platforms available in Renode, which already includes, among others, the NXP S32K Automotive General-Purpose MCU. Thanks to Renode’s building block nature and pre-silicon simulation capabilities, we can bring your new platform to Renode even before it’s fully defined.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of integrating Renode into your development workflow, or other engineering services offered by Antmicto, such as adding, testing, and maintaining platform support in Zephyr, reach out to us at contact@antmicro.com.
