Spartan-3 partial reconfiguration trouble

"Pablo Bleyer Kocik" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...

Hi first many congratulations for th s430, I assume it yours ?

yes I am afraid you are about right - the S3 partial reconfig - my guess is nobody is using it, it could be useable but the effort to get it done could be too high to be reasonable.

it could, OTOH maybe you just about to get it working the way you are trying. But dont expect much help, its nomans land where you are walking! ASFAIK Xilinx (Spartan group!) has interest in S3 partial reconfig. (maybe thats outdated info, but I had/have that impression)

Antti

"Antti Lukats" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:cvigln$1tl$02$ snipped-for-privacy@news.t-online.com...

UUPS, typo: I meant "Xilinx has NO interest in S3 partial reconfig..."

"Antti Lukats" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:cvigln$1tl$02$ snipped-for-privacy@news.t-online.com...

There are many ways to skin a cat. Different filters can also be realized by keeping the processing structure (MACs, delays etc.) but just reloading filter coefficients, which can be done using BRAM, SRL16, SelectRAM. Or go for a complete hazzle free approach, reconfigure the whole FPGA and keep an (complete) FPGA image for every different filter in FLASH memory (its cheap)

Regards Falk

Yes, the beast is mine. It was just a small hobby project I started working on many months ago to fight boredom and it was victim of the snowball effect. I am afraid I have actually grown very dependent of my own creation. ;) Although the MSP430 is not an ideal architecture for FPGAs, the core size and code density is very good, and I am able to use the GCC toolchain seamlessly with it. Really, I have been able to do wonderful things with just 2 BlockRAMs. And when I ported it to Spartan-3 I got a multiplier peripheral almost for free, so the floating point routines now run very happily ever after. :)

I have now a pipelined version that allows faster clocking. Sadly I don't have very much spare time left in order to verify and write-back the changes to the CVS faster.

Hmmm... I am very sorry to realize this. It would be nice to hear from someone who has actually used the reconfiguration capabilities of the device. Maybe it is *not* reconfigurable at all and I am just wasting my time! :S

I will keep trying, as you say. But I am afraid that, if I eventually get this to work, I will have to battle with the design every time I change the filter parameters or generate a new filter. The front effort was going to be worth only if the filter management was streamline after that...

Thanks again. Best regards.

-- /"If you would not be forgotten PabloBleyerKocik / As soon as you are dead and rotten, pbleyer / Either write things worth reading, @embedded.cl / Or do things worth writing."- Benjamin Franklin

realized by

reloading

I am already doing this for some kind of filters when it is possible to do so. For example, my delays always have maximum taps and I control bypass writing to a memory-mapped register with the MCU. Then I get only the taps I need. The problem is that there are many audio processing structures that are very, very different. I even have a morph engine that stores an evolvent in *big* distributed RAM (takes almost all of the available slices of the FPGA), in order to convolve it with an incoming signal. The only way I can do this is to re-use most of the FPGA area available.

and

memory

That was my first approach, but then I will need an external controller which is what I am trying to avoid, since I already need and have the MCU inside...

Thank you for your suggestions. Regards.

-- PabloBleyerKocik /"Artificial Intelligence: the art of making pbleyer / computers that behave like the ones in movies." @embedded.cl / -- Bill Bulko

I have had email exchanges with a person at Xilinx about this. None of the Spartan chips are currently supported, but I have been told that Xilinx is "committed" to providing partial-reconfiguration for the Spartan 3 chips (this was over a year ago, so I'm not sure what "committed" really means ;). There are two problems with getting PR working in the Spartan 3.

The first issue is the fact that PR has used tristate buffers to connect to long lines to provide the intermodule connections. This has worked in the Virtex family. However the V4 chips also have no tristate buffers. So Xilinx is working on that problem and I expect their solution will be portable to the S3 parts.

But the second problem is the lack of interest in S3 PR in the customer base. I am surprised at this since it can make the difference between a $10 FPGA and a $20 FPGA and/or a $5 flash memory and a $10 flash memory.

I believe you are looking to use PR the same way I want to. You don't need to do it on the fly with the rest of the chip running, you just need to download modules in different combinations to provide the final download that suits the current need. But I may be mistaken here. If you don't have an external processor to load the FPGA, were you planning to use the internal proc to do that? I may be mistaken, but I think there is a special block in the FPGA to allow internal logic to load a new design (I forget the name, it may be IMAP). I seem to recall that the Spartan 3 does not have this block so PR must be controlled from the outside.

There are some limitations to loading the partial configuration while the rest of the chip is alive. It may be that you just plain can't do it, or it may just be that the chip does not allow blocks adjacent to the partial load to be active. There are also limitations in that an S3 PR block must use full columns while the Virtex chips (or maybe just V4) can load partial columns. I do recall that the S3 is much more limited in the way it can do PR than the Virtex parts.

Rick Collins

snipped-for-privacy@XYarius.com

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design

of

Yes, I read your previous posts on the subject.

connect

worked

Wow, that is something new. I didn't know they had dropped the TBUFs in Virtex-4! Does this mean that Virtex-4 is not reconfigurable by modules?

customer

between a

memory.

Exactly. A single chip solution is worthwhile on its own sake.

don't

final

If

planning

I have a known-good initial bitstream in a configuration Flash (the 'boot' image). After that I disable it and I read data from a memory card, including the other bitstreams.

that

the

That is the ICAP block I was asking about. It seems the SP-3 has an ICAP but it either doesn't work or there are no tools to use it.

do

S3

V4)

limited

Yes. I am assuming appnote 290 applies to Spartan-3 also, I used it to prepare my design for PR. Many Xilinx documentation refer to SP-3s partially reconfiguring, but I haven't found the definitive reference yet...

Cheers.

PabloBleyerKocik /"Person who say it cannot be done pbleyer / should not interrupt person doing it." @embedded.cl / -- Chinese proverb

V4 still has full PR capability, but the old software does not support it. I have been told they are actively working on the software to support PR in the V4 chips. In fact, V4 has more capability I believe in that it can be configured in partial columns.

Do you require the FPGA to be running when you load the other bitstreams.

If it is there, I am pretty sure it does not support configuration.

APP290 does not apply to S3 yet. What docs talk about PR in S3s?

(the

memory

bitstreams.

It is the only way I will be able to load bitstreams from the memory card and do a couple of other things at the same time.

At least the datasheet mentions it (regarding the SelectMAP interface). Also XAPP462 refers to it in the bitgen generation section. An there is the #18416 Answer Record...

Cheers.

-- PabloBleyerKocik /"But what... is it good for?" pbleyer / -- 1968 Engineer at IBM's Advanced Computing @embedded.cl / Systems Division, commenting on the microchip