PowerPC based SoC design, getting it working from first attempt

Feb 22, 2006 3 Replies
A

The speaker at Xilinx presentation at Embedded World asked the crowd: "Has anyone managed to create an FPGA System On Chip design - with first time success?"



"I have", was my reply: "... using LEON3 GRLIB!"



to be fully honest my response wasnt exactly true.



I did manage to get LEON3 system working in FPGA within a few hours, but I dont really recall if first FPGA configuration loaded was actually working or not. Maybe not.



But as of today, I could answer the same question with: "Yes I have" - and be really correct this time.



Some 20 minutes ago, I started XPS (EDK 8.1 SP1), new project, V4FX-12, click, click, done, changing 3 PIN location constraints (sys_clk, rxd, txd).. save .ucf file, then menu



Device->Download



and I got a prompt on serial console connected to FPGA board! First time synthesis, first FPGA download, system working.



So the first time success is possible! :)



Antti



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I

Hi,

yes of course... when you use a well-supported board (like Xilinx boards), but if you have a board that it is not specific developed for SoC designs, that assertion is not true :(

Ivan

P.S.: I have also got a LEON3/MB/PPC system working from first attempt... but using an appropiate board (and some months of experience) :D

Antti wrote:

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A

Yes/No

I was using custom board for the PPC design mentioned, not anything even remotly similar to any supported Xilinx boards, so I created a full custom system, and that worked. But agree, I only used uart lite for simple hello greeting. At next step adding a DCM I had to use 2 synthese attempts to get it working again (the DCM runs from 12MHz external clock so its little difficult to setup properly).

And with LEON3 I wasnt using supported board either (with supported board it most likely would have worked from first config attempt) - and all of that getting working on first attempt (or within hours) is only possible with lots of experience ;)

Antti

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I

Then, I share your stance/viewpoint about that ;)

Ivan

Antti wrote:

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