Write to Flash with Keil Simulator

Posted on February 26, 2016 at 12:47

Assume the simulator is very poor at replicating gate level functionality and peripheral emulation.

You should test on real hardware without a debugger attached.

Posted on February 26, 2016 at 13:02

Thanks for getting back to me.

The idea is to write unit tests that ideally run on a simulator

It feels like there must be a way to modify the data in ROM if its simply a simulator...

If I try to set the value of a register at a ROM address, nothing happens either - so I'm assuming it's to do with Keil's simulator that doesn't allow those registers to be edited?

Posted on February 26, 2016 at 14:18

When there were a few dozen simple ARM chips Keil/RealView had a good simulator for them, now there a thousands, with complex peripherals, and the problem is unmanageable.

Also back then test board run hundreds of dollars, today about ten dollars.

If you are a fully paid up Keil customer you could perhaps ask them for specific support, or allow you to build a peripheral emulation layer. These things wouldn't be gate level emulations, which would be a whole different level of cost, but rather someone's interpretation of the reference manual, mixed with some hardware validation and design skills. I generally think of this as comparing two interpretations of documentation, rather than comparing against reality. I see diminishing value there, and effort would be better applied to rigorous static analysis.

You could also build your own test framework.

Posted on February 29, 2016 at 06:48

Yeah, I agree. But I simply want to write to memory and see that the correct things are written. I'm writing a double buffering settings module and would like to unit test using our unit testing platform which is based on the simulator

I did manage to get around this. I noticed that I can edit the section of flash below the application. It pretty much works like RAM memory - which isn't ideal, but is good enough for now.

Anyways, thanks for your insights.