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Projects

Title Updated date Comment count
Arm Cortex-A53 processor 6 days 22 hours ago 2
ADC Integration in nanoSoC 5 days 6 hours ago 4
High Bandwidth Expansion Subsystem 1 month 2 weeks ago 0
nanoSoC Test/development Board 3 weeks ago 0
DMA 350 integration with nanoSoC 6 months 3 weeks ago 0
nanosoc re-usable MCU platform 1 week 5 days ago 0
Building system-optimised AMBA interconnect 11 months 1 week ago 0
DMA Infrastructure Developments 1 week 3 days ago 9
Arm Cortex-M0 microcontroller 11 months 1 week ago 5
Hardware SoC bus level debug agent (v4) 11 months 1 week ago 2

Articles

Technology

Authored Comments

Subject Comment Link to Comment
Work in progress - FPGA prototyping stage

Lots more information to follow

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FPGA prototyping design flow and example

John - thanks for reviewing this - and my premature publishing of the confusing hierarchy:

  • https://soclabs.org/design-flow/fpga-prototyping ideally will become the generic Design Flow overview
  • https://soclabs.org/design-flow/fpga-soc-prototyping-xilinxr-pynqr-platform is a project specific example

So in some ways the second is a project that refers (to and from) the Cortex-M0 reference design project and could potentially be linked to form the first as a design-flow example.

Guidance on how to repair hierarchy would be valuable: I could only think of copying to new area and then deleting the original(?)

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Thank you so much Meredith…

Thank you so much Meredith for the detailed review feedback.

I have checked back into git the 'set_property top' fixes identified, but have struggled and failed to get to the bottom of the 'locked' IP issue you reported (which I fail to reproduce in my environment for some reason). I build up the TCL commands from running the IP packaging from the command line and despite spending a fair time digging through the Xilinx documentation have failed to find a clean alternative version. [Would you mind emailing me the journal-transcript when you next run the IPX packaging just in case this is different to what my environment gives?]

Very best wishes and do hope your FPGA prototype is making good progress

  --David

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Cortex-M0 IP paths

It looks as if the AAA Cortex-M0 deliverables were updated in the Southampton site and the paths do need to be repaired in tbench_M0.vc as you suspected.

I have had a quick look at the installation and it appears as if :

  .../aaa-ARM-ip/Cortex-M0/AT510-BU-00000-r0p0-03rel3/

may now be referenced using the updated "version independent" path

  .../aaa-ARM-ip/latest/Cortex-M0/

similarly the Corstone-101 IP:

  ...aaa-ARM-ip/Corstone-101_Foundation_IP/BP210-BU-00000-r1p1-00rel0/

to

  .../aaa-ARM-ip/latest/Corstone-101/

and the PL230 micro-DMA:

  .../aaa-ARM-ip/DMA-230_MicroDMA_Controller/PL230-BU-00000-r0p0-02rel2/shared/

to

  .../aaa-ARM-ip/latest/DMA-230/

I do hope this works for you - and the explicit relative path issues, inherited from Arm CMSDK are addressed by setting clean environment variables in the nanosoc deliverables

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Cortex-M0 file paths

Sorry this is not straightforward. I have checked in the new preferred "/latest/" link paths into the repository so these should be ready when you have Southampton server access.

In the meantime, would you be happy to add a few more symbolic links to your installation of AAA IP bundles under the "arm-AAA-ip" directory you have built? If you create a directory at the top level named "latest" and then in that directory build symbolic links that match the new preferred pathnames then I think you should be able to make progress.

for example for Cortex-M0 CPU, but similarly for Corstone-101 and DMA230...

  in arm-AAA-ip/latest/ directory, create a soft-link something like :

     ln -s ../Cortex-M0/AT510-r0p0-03rel2/AT510-BU-50000-r0p0-03rel2    Cortex-M0

(or similar - such that ls -al shows your "latest/Cortex-M0" now points to the directory in the Arm IP that includes the logical verilog IP directory. And confirm this by listing what is visible at arm-AAA-ip/latest/Cortex-M0/logical/ )

This should then remove exact bundle part numbers and be ready for full server access when you can switch your link to the  managed AAA IP repository 

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Transition from FPGA to System on Chip design

Following up the comments from John D, I suggest there are three distinct phases for this project:

  1. HLS synthesis and validation and benchmarking in (Zynq) FPGA which has ample Processor and DDR Memory resources
  2. Partitioning analysis for accelerator, bulk memory and control processing - both for bandwidth and area
  3. Feasibility study for PCIe (hardware and driver stack), DDR memory and on-chip memory/processing (which would likely require specialized PHY and advanced semiconductor technology)

The project proposal as it stands I think would be very hard to fully complete successfully within a limited time (and budget) if the assumption is simply to map the transformer and memory system architecture to a 65nm process technology(?)

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