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Xilinx V2Pro & SATA hard disk

Hi all, Does anyone has implemented a SATA link on Xilinx V2Pro to connect to a hard disk drive ? Indeed, we have the Xilinx XUP V2Pro Dev board from Digilent and it has a SATA connector. So I'm wondering if one can control a hard disk drive from this SATA connector. Furthermore, I would like to mount the disk on linux running on the PPC. I've already compiled and installed an own driver on linux and I'm wondering if it would be possible to mount a SATA hard disk drive.

Do you have any information about such development ?

Thanks a lot for your help

Stéphane

Reply to
Mancini Stephane
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I believe all you need is to power the drive and to have a kernel compiled with sata support.

I want to do this with the xupv2pro board but haven't had the time.

Could also use uclinux as well.

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Alex

Reply to
Alex Gibson

Well, I've just had a look at the SATA specification document and there are 100 pages to deal with the link layer (synchronization + CRC + base primitives). The IP should run at 75 MHz and it's not so easy... The I/O IP itself is about 1 month (even more) of development. It's true that standard SATA linux driver could be used.

Stéphane

Reply to
Mancini Stephane

Sorry, but you can't implement SATA directly with V-II Pro devices. Well at least not across the full compliance spectrum of SATA.

The problems with implementing the standard are rooted in the OOB signalling requirements that require the TXP/TXN pair to be squelched to the common mode voltage (this can be implemented with an external circuit) and the spread spectrum clocking that may be present in the external drive (which can not be worked around).

Both Xilinx and other vendors did place SATA connectors on our boards and these connectors can be used for general RocketIO MGT connections between boards using the Aurora protocol or anything else that you care to send across them.

Virtex-4 can implemented SATA natively, but we do not yet have a full core released either from Xilinx or one of our Alliance partners at this time.

Ed

Reply to
Ed McGettigan

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