First Voyage of Arm Academic Access (AAA)

Welcome to SoC Labs. I would like to share my first journey in using the Arm Academic Access (AAA) IP. In this post, I hope to show,  how to register, how to connect Arm servers and what may be useful to download as the first steps. You may find some of the screenshots useful. Here is a quick review: 

• How to get download access to the Arm Academic Access(AAA) IP Package
• What the End User Acknowledgement form looks like, which needs to be signed.
• How long it may take to receive your invitation email 
• How to proceed from their email to registration process on Product Download Hub
• What information you may need for the registration details and what is optional 
• First login to the Product Download Hub (PDH) pages 
• How to download your target IP 
• What you need to initiate download while ensuring that you are approaching from your production server 
• How to receive SMS and enter the verification code 
• How to narrow down our IP selections and Download options
• The next articles will share production server setup and git SVC installation for our SoC framework 

How to get download access to the Arm Academic Access(AAA) IP Package 

In my journey, my University (Southampton) was already registered as a University and so my first step was to get authorised for AAA with help from my local University AAA Admin (Arvin Cedric). My local admin provided the "AAA End User Acknowledgement Form". If your institution isn't already part of Arm Academic Access then please fill out the following form to gain access: https://www.arm.com/resources/research/enablement/academic-access-inquiry Also remember to use your academic email address in the form because your email address will be registered for further communication and access privileges, and a specific domain is enabled.

What the End User Acknowledgement form looks like, which needs to be signed 

 

How long it may take to receive your invitation email

Please remember these forms need to be signed with your inked(wet) signature. Yes, I shamelessly have done it by signing electronically by my name, but it needs the real one. My signature cannot be seen from the blurred images. After the paperwork is signed and checked by you, then you can use the same academic email address to send them. Please do not use another email address to contact them because it may cause you some delays (Yes, it happened to me). You should be expecting a welcome email from Arm Research Enablement. Please give them at least a week to arrive in your inbox. 

The email from Arm will have a subject: "Access to the Arm Academic Access - General Users" that tells us to follow the Product Download Hub link (PDH, https://developer.arm.com/downloads-beta). 

How to proceed to the registration process on Product Download Hub

In fact, PDH welcomes us with a login page. You can easily select the registration tab at the centre. You need to type in your academic email address (the same one you already used and the one submitted by your university for the Access Control List). Then wait a couple of minutes to receive their email. This verification email provides you with 6 digits alphanumeric code to verify that you are the person who maintains their contact. 

What information you may need for the registration details and what is optional

Their email with a verification code lands you at their same login/registration web page. The registration is pretty straightforward. You enter your registered email address and verification code into the register tab. Then the registration page reveals its subsections.

You need to enter at least your first name, last name, country, company address, city, and company address, and assign your new password and confirm it.

First login to the Product Download Hub (PDH) pages

Please make sure the email address you first registered with is the same email address you keep in contact with them. You may guess you will finally get the confirmation emails from them very soon to welcome you again...but actually, there is no need. You can bravely go to the Product Download Hub link(PDH, https://developer.arm.com/downloads-beta). Then enter your email and password.

If you see this error, don't worry it happened to me. The reason is you may have multiple email alias' "your_username@uni.ac.uk" "your_name.surname@uni.ac.uk". Please be careful to maintain your AAA contact and registration with only one of them and maintain that email dearly.

How to download your target IP 

If you see yourself on the Product Download Page and your username is hanging at the top right corner of the website, you are at the right place. 

What you need to initiate download while ensuring that you are approaching from your production server

If you search with very general keywords, you may feel thunderstruck and overwhelmed due to the vast number of IPs and their documentation. I felt the same especially when I saw the bottom of the page footer shows 1...12 pages and so on. Please try to identify the specific product ID, for example, enter the Product ID: BP306-GRP into the search bar. This will narrow down your search results. David has a brilliant project page to let you go through to design Arm Cortex-M0 based SoC project (Arm Cortex-M0 microcontroller | SoC Labs). You can find all Product IDs you need to start a project such as Corstone 101 (Product ID: BP306-GRP), Cortex-M0 CPU (Product ID: AT510-GRP), [Optional] CoreLink DMA-230 AHB Micro DMA (Product ID: PL230-GRP). When you press "Add to queue" button, it means download. You may be surprised like me to see another Arm web page pops up!

How to receive SMS and enter the verification code

You need to enter your mobile number to verify that you really would like to download it. I just clicked to "Send Code" and received an SMS verification code very quickly. And I entered the same code into the following menu. It's a one-time verification on that session. Then you land on the product page. Yay!

How to narrow down our IP selections and Download options

 The product page layout is quite familiar. You should see the yellow "Download Now" button then you can click it. 

The download popup appeared immediately to ask me to choose between their "10 times faster download server" and traditional HTTP server, I clicked the good old version and you can see the product is downloading relatively quickly! 

I tend to keep things simple and stupid to start with. So let us use an example of a genius idea and a difficult problem, to begin with. Let us say we need a kind of controller which we can manage with simple C code (or someone comes up with some Python wrappers for it). It may be a 32-bit microcontroller something like Cortex-M0. You may already know it and use it as an STM32 (Arm Cortex-M0 - Microcontrollers - STMicroelectronics) or something like that. The whole idea is to connect our sensors and data output and that is the core processing system we would like to use. We prepare our SoC environment to use the pure sheer power of Cortex M and others. It is a quite different and rewarding journey.  

 

In the following posts, I will share our production server setup to maintain our AAA IPs and Custom IPs securely and share git SVC installation for our SoC framework.  

I hope you enjoyed my AAA registration journey. Please feel free to comment below. How did you find it? What would you like to design for your first AAA project?

You are more than welcome to register yourself to SoC Labs as a contributor. We would like to share our experiences openly and grow our community.

Please check our projects, you may find something interesting or someone with a similar interest to you who you can collaborate with. 

Hakan