3rd Party/Other Boards and Kits

[manish.ranade]

Hello,

Has anyone used Digilent's Atlys board?

Keen on knowing DDR b/w obtained and MIG settings suitable to use that memory.

There's no reference design yet

Cheers,

Manish 

[hirschdaumen]

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There's no reference design yet

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What about this? Otherwise the user manual can tell you all the thing you need (which is mostly, since it is a spartan-6 board using the MCB, just the memory device)

[manish.ranade]

hi hirschdaumen,

Did you manage to use DDR2 on  Atlys?

Let me know, I am not sure about buying this board as have no reference design / success stories about DDR2 access besides Agillent user's guide claim ".....tested at 800 MHz...."

Manish

[hirschdaumen]

I never used this board, just seeing other people asking for help. But as I can see it, is all you need for a successful DDR2 implementation is in the docs.

[manish.ranade]

Their website says "Source code for Atlys DDR2 and SPI Flash memory controller configuration" is available.

I have downloaded the zip file and there's no DDR2 related stuff. 

Digillent support says reference design will be available in next quarter.

Hence exploring has anyone got it working with own efforts.

[wgordy]

I just bought this board and I started playing with it today. I was hoping to use Coregen to interface to the DDR2 ram, but I'm not really sure what I'm doing. Has anyone had any success with using the ram?

[manish.ranade]

Coregen - MIG should be the right way to start. 

Interested to know about outcome of your experiments..

[manish.ranade]

I looked into MIG 

in "Memory Part" selection, DDR2 part on Atlys (MT47H64M16HR-25E) is not listed.

So thats makes us to use "Create custom part" and we enter in the world entering memory timing parameters etc.

In this stage the information fed should be VERY ACCURATE as it will affect correctness and efficiency of generated RTL. 

So lot of work stored ahead 

[wgordy]

MTH47H64M16XX-25E is listed for me. I'm just assuming that the 'HR' in the part number doesn't affect the interface. I haven't read through the getting started guides yet but it seems kinda straight forward. I'm kinda disappointed that digilent didn't provide an ise webpack design project that demonstrated the whole board. Their documentation was much better for the Nexys2 board. In the meantime, I got the new picoblaze processor up and running really quick. I also hooked up the HDMI output from the demo program to my TV, kinda disappointing. The picture has all sorts of noisy red lines through it. I hope the RAM can be configured to work better. I'm working on it tomorrow all day, snow day!

[manish.ranade]

Yes the DDR2 part appears in ISE 12.3, I was looking into 12.1

Then I guess its a matter of looking into Atlys schematics and provide that info like Drive strength, termination etc to MIG