Elphel Development Blog

NC393 progress update and a second life of the NC353 FPGA code

Another update on the development of the NC393 camera: finished adding FPGA code that re-implements functionality of the NC353 camera (just with additional multi-sensor capability), including JPEG/JP4 compressors, IMU/GPS logger and inter-camera synchronization. Next step – simulation and debugging, and it will use co-simulating of the same sensor image data using the code of the existing NC353 camera. This involves updating of that camera code to the state compatible with the development tools we use, and so the additional sub-project was spawned.

Verilog code development with VDT plugin for Eclipse IDE

Before describing the renovation of the NC353 camera FPGA code I need to tell about the software we use for the last year. Living in the world where FPGA chip manufactures have monopoly (or duopoly as there are 2 major players) on the rather poor software tools, I realize that this will not change in the short term. But it is possible to constrain those proprietary creations in the designated “cages” letting them do only certain tasks that require secret knowledge of the chip internals, but do not let them take control of the whole development process, depend on them abandoning one software environment and introducing another half-made one as soon as you’ll get used to the previous.

This is what VDT is about – it uses one of the most standard development environments – Eclipse IDE, combines it with a heavily modified version of VEditor and the Tool Specification Language that allows developers to integrate additional tools without getting inside the plugin code itself. Integration involves writing tool descriptions in TSL (this work is based on the tool manufacturer manual that specifies command options and parameters) and possibly creating custom parsers for the tool output – these programs may be written in any programming language developer is comfortable with.

Current integration includes the Free Software simulation programs (such as Icarus Verilog with GtkWave). As it is safe to rely on the Free Software we may add code specific to these programs in the plugin body to have deeper integration and combine code and waveforms navigation, breakpoints support.

For the FPGA synthesis and implementation tools this software supports Xilinx ISE and Vivado, we are now working on Altera Quartus too. There is no VDT code dependence on the specifics of each of these tools, and the tools are connected to the IDE using ssh and rsync, so they do not have to run on the same workstation.

Renovating the NC353 camera code

Initially I just planned to enter the NC353 camera FPGA code into VDT environment for simulation. When I opened it in this IDE it showed more than 200 warnings in the code. Most were just unused wires/registers and signal width mismatch that did not impact the functioning of the camera, but at least one was definitely a bug – a one that gets control in very rare occasions and so is difficult to catch.

When I fixed most of these warnings and made sure simulation works, I decided to try to run ISE 14.7 tools and generate a functional bitstream. There were multiple incompatibilities between ISE 10 (which was last used to generate a bitstream) and the current version – most modifications were needed to change description of the I/O standard and other parameters of the device pins (from constraint file and “// synthesis attribute …” in the code to modern style of using parameters.

That turned out to be doable – first I made the design agree with all the tools to the very last (bitstream generation), then reconciled the generated pad report with the one generated with old tools (there are still some differences remaining but they are understandable and OK). Finally I had to figure out that I need to turn on non-default option to use timing constraints and how to change the speed grade to match the one used with the old tools, and that resulted in a bitstream file that I tested on just one camera and got images. It was a second attempt – the first one resulted in a “kernel panic” and I had to reflash the camera. The project repository has the detailed description how to make such testing safe, but it is still better to try using your modified FPGA code only if you know how to “unbrick” the camera.

We’ll do more testing of the bit files generated by the ISE 14.7, but for now we need to focus on the NC393 development and use NC393 code as a reference for simulation.

Back to NC393

Before writing simulation test code for the NC393 camera, I made the code to pass all the Vivado tools and result in a bitfile. That required some code tweaking, but finally it worked. Of course there will be some code change to fix bugs revealed during verification, but most likely changes will not be radical. This assumption allows to see the overall device utilization and confirm that the final design is going to fit.

One AXI general purpose master port (MAXI_GP) and one AXI “high performance” 64-bit slave port are reserved for the SATA controller, and the 64-bit cache-coherent port (AXI_ACP) will be used for CPU accelerators for the multi-sensor image processing.

Next development step will be simulation and debugging of the project code, and luckily large part of the code can be verified by comparing with the older NC353