1. Purpose and scope
Bring-up is the point where months of work on models meets the real chip. The boot ROM was frozen into the masks, the boot loaders, firmware and drivers were proven on emulation, and now they must run on silicon that may differ from the models in timing, analogue behaviour, reset sequencing, power and in bugs nobody found before tape-out. The purpose of this stage is to get the full software stack running on every supported reference board, to find out quickly what is wrong and where, and to leave behind a clear record of every silicon issue and the software answer to it.
Software bring-up paces silicon validation. Most of the chip cannot be exercised without firmware to configure clocks and power, drivers to move data, and an operating system to run tests, so the SoC validation team waits on this stage. That makes the bring-up order and the debug infrastructure, decided in the pre-silicon stage, the most important plans in the lab: blocks that open up the most validation come first.
In scope: safe power-up of silicon and reference boards, first boot through the boot ROM to the first stage loader, bring-up of boot loaders, firmware, drivers and the board support package, issue triage between hardware and software, model-to-silicon correlation, the errata list and its software workarounds, and the bring-up report. Out of scope: full validation across configurations and operating systems, which belongs to Software Validation & Compliance, and electrical characterisation of the silicon, which belongs to the SoC lifecycle.
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