Develop and Validate Firmware Pre-Silicon on Arm Neoverse CSS V3

Who is this for?

This advanced topic is for firmware developers, system architects, and silicon validation engineers working on Arm Neoverse CSS platforms who require a pre-silicon workflow for the CSS-V3 reference design using Fixed Virtual Platforms (FVPs).

What will you learn?

Upon completion of this Learning Path, you will be able to:

• Explain the CSS-V3 architecture and the RD-V3 firmware boot sequence (TF-A, RSE, SCP/MCP/LCP, UEFI/GRUB, Linux)
• Set up a containerized build environment and sync sources with a pinned manifest using repo
• Build and boot the RD-V3 firmware stack on FVP and map UART consoles to components
• Interpret boot logs to verify bring-up and diagnose boot-stage issues
• Modify platform control firmware (for example, SCP/MCP) and validate changes via pre-silicon simulation
• Launch a dual-chip RD-V3-R1 simulation and verify AP/MCP coordination

Prerequisites

Before starting, you will need the following:

• Access to an Arm Neoverse-based Linux machine (cloud or local) with at least 80 GB of free storage
• Familiarity with Linux command-line tools and basic scripting
• Understanding of firmware boot stages and SoC-level architecture
• Docker installed, or a GitHub Codespaces-compatible development environment