FPGA Hacking¶
The general purpose FPGA on the Novena mainboard is a Xilinx Spartan6 XC6SLX45
device in the CSG324 BGA package with a -3 speedgrade. It is connected to
the ARM CPU via SPI for bitstream configuration, via i2c for low-speed
communications, and via a 16-bit memory interface (“EIM”) for faster
communications. The FPGA also has its own DRAM chip and an expansion header to
which extra hardware can be attached.
| Part Number | Xilinx Spartan6 XC6SLX45 |
|---|---|
| Slices | 6822 |
| Logic Cells | 43661 |
| CLB Flip-Flops | 54576 |
| Max Distributed RAM | 50 KB (401 Kb) |
| Block RAM | 261 KB (116x 18 Kb blocks) |
| Clock Management Tiles (CMT) | 4 |
| DSP48A Slices | 58 |
| PCIe Hard Blocks | None |
| Memory Controller Blocks | 2 |
| Gigabit Transcievers (GTP) | None |
| Bitfile Size | 1.49 MB (11.9 Mb) |
| US Market Price | $53 (@100, December 2014) |
For those just getting started with FPGA development, two sources of free/libre learning resources are the free range factory website (including the libre “Free Range VHDL” book, and a mirror of opencores.org), and Xess Corp’s free “FPGAs? Now What?!” book (pdf). These guides cover a lot of context about getting vendor software installed, HDL languages, FPGA hardware resources, timing and constraint specification, the compilation and synthesis process, and the various toolchain workflows; this content won’t be repeated here.
GPBB FPGA Communications Quickstart¶
The General Purpose Breakout Board (GPBB) comes installed on the expansion port header of all Novenas. It’s got some LEDs and analog I/O (see the wiki for details), which make it great for simple FPGA experimentation and blinky light displays.
Before we can control the GPBB from linux, we need to load a bitfile to the FPGA (which controls the expansion header) and install some userland software to talk to the FPGA over the EIM interface.
Run these commands from a Novena with the GPBB attached to compile the userland programs:
sudo apt-get install i2c-tools libi2c-dev
cd # sic.
git clone https://github.com/bunnie/novena-gpbb-example
cd novena-gpbb-example
make -j4
Then use the helper script and bitfile included in the novena-gpbb-example
repo to configure the FPGA (this would need to be done after every power cycle
of the board):
sudo ./configure.sh novena_fpga.bit
And check if we can read metadata from the hardware:
sudo ./novena-gpbb -v
Finally, make with the blinkenlights and toggle the four LEDs on the GPBB, connected to I/O port B, pins 0 to 3:
sudo ./novena-gpbb -oeb 1 # set port B to drive
for BIT in 0 1 2 3; do
sudo ./novena-gpbb -p_set b $BIT # Set pin
sleep 1
done
sudo ./novena-gpbb -p b 00 # Write 0x00, i.e. reset all pins
sudo ./novena-gpbb -oeb 0 # return port B to tristate mode
Joy!
