I am trying to debug the sdram interface on a custom board I built. I need to look at some of the internal signals of the PLB_DDR interface. I modified the VHDL code and the .mpd file. However, the changes that I made to the .mpd file don't show up in EDK. Has anyone seen this before? I know I modified the correct mpd because when I select view mpd in EDK, the changes that I made show up.
I have created custom peripherals before, and changes that I've made to other non-xilinx created mpd files show up in EDK. So is this a known issue with xilinx predefined mpd files?
If you haven't done so already, do a "clean" on your project. Xilinx cores are all marked as "CORE_STATE = ACTIVE", so changes in MPD and VHD files won't be picked up between builds (synthesis results are cached). When you are core hacking, make sure you have CORE_STATE = DEVELOPMENT in the MPD file to prevent EDK from caching.
A related suggestion: Never modify MPD/PAO/VHD files in the ${EDK}/hw/... pcores hierarchy. Why? Because you'll surely forget, then one day have some utterly un-debuggabble issue that traces back to munging you've done on standard cores.
Much better to copy the core of interest into your project-local pcores directory, and hack on it there. The search path is
local pcores directory overridden edk_user_repository path specified in XMP file. ${EDK}/../edk_user_repository ${EDK}/hw/XilinxProcessorIPLib/pcores
When doing the local copy trick of standard Xilinx cores, you can get cute and only copy the files you need to modify - e.g. the MPD and one or two VHD files. Xilinx do this sometimes with EDK reference designs that need some massaging of standard cores.
It's also not a bad idea to change the core version number to something silly like 99.99.z to make it clear in your designs that it's not the standard one. This requires some directory renaming and editing of PAO and VHD files to get the package names correct.
What version of EDK are you using. Starting EDK 8.2, there is a __MpdDataBase.txt file in the pcores area of Xilinx installation area that's essentially a cat of all the MPD files. So, unless you also make changes to this file, XPS won't see the changes in MPD. The recommended way is to make a local copy of the desired pcore and start making changes.
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