Despite playing with my miniSpartan3 board for quite a while, I’d never attempted to write my FPGA designs to the SPI flash on the board. This means that the FPGA board didn’t do anything until I deployed my design onto it manually - quite useless if you were using the board for a real project, and on power-on you needed it to go to work immediately.
Turns out though, it is fairly simple to do, as long as you have the larger XC3S200A variant with an Atmel AT45DB041D flash chip - that’s the only way I’ve been able to validate this method with.…
One of the things which RPU has done from the start is keep the cpu pipeline very simple. It’s a Fetch, Decode, Execute, [Memory], Writeback pipeline, but it does not run pipelined. Some operations really do require multiple cycles to execute, and in this post we figure out how to add this functionality into the CPU…
This is part of a series of posts detailing the steps and learning undertaken to design and implement a CPU in VHDL. Previous parts are available here, and I’d recommend they are read before continuing.
Interrupts and exceptions are important events that any CPU needs to handle. The usual definition is that interrupts happen outside of the CPU – timer events, for example. Exceptions occur within the CPU, like trying to execute an invalid instruction. These events are handled all the time within a system, and whilst some signify faults and error conditions – most are just handling system functionality.…
This is part of a series of posts detailing the steps and learning undertaken to design and implement a CPU in VHDL. Previous parts are available here, and I’d recommend they are read before continuing.
For those who follow me on twitter, you’ll have seen my recent tweets regarding Zephyr OS running on RPU. This was a huge amount of work to get running, most of it debugging on the FPGA itself. For those new to FPGA development, trying to debug on-chip can be a very difficult and frustrating experience. Generally, you want to debug in the simulator – but when potential issues are influenced by external devices such as SD cards, timer interrupts, and hundreds of millions of cycles into the boot process of an operating system – simulators may not be feasible.…
Recently, Tomasz Mloduchowski posted a popular article on his blog detailing the steps he undertook to get access to the hidden PCIe interface of Raspberry Pi 4: the first Raspberry Pi to include PCIe in its design. After seeing his post, and realizing I was meaning to go buy a Raspberry Pi 4, it just seemed natural to try and replicate his results in the hope of taking it a bit further. I am known for Raspberry Pi Butchery, after all.
Before I tried desoldering anything, I set up my Pi for remote use; enabling SSH, WiFi, serial UART+ boot messages.…
This is part of a series of posts detailing the steps and learning undertaken to design and implement a CPU in VHDL. Previous parts are available here, and I’d recommend they are read before continuing.
You may remember after the switch from my own TPU ISA to RISC-V was made, I stated that interrupts were disabled. This was due to requirements for RISC-V style interrupt mechanisms not being compatible with what I’d done on TPU. In order to get Interrupts back into RPU, we need to go and implement the correct Control and Status Registers(CSRs) required for management of interrupts – enable bits, interrupt vectors, interrupt causes – they are all communicated via CSRs.…
