REDS blog – Page 3 – REDS Institute, HEIG-VD

Configuring the Cyclone V FPGA from a SD card

April 15, 2019

Sometimes it is handy to have the CPU program the FPGA using a file stored on an SD card. This post shows you how this can be quickly done with Quartus and a Cyclone V-based board. Using Quartus Prime, convert the generated .sof file into .rbf without compression (menu: Convert programming files). Next, place the .rbf file thus created on the FAT32 partition of the SD card. U-Boot requires a boot script (u-boot.scr) that can be generated from a regular…

A quick note on some Arria 10 intricacies

February 22, 2019

Xavier Ruppen

Socfpga

3 Comments

A previous article on this blog, “Everything mainline from the ground up”, shows how to build mainline U-boot and Linux for Altera socfpgas. While the Cyclone V and the Stratix 10 are widely used and well supported, much cannot be said about the Arria 10. The Arria 10’s bitstream is separated in two parts: the so-called “peripheral” and “core” bitstreams (the A10 Reference Manual gives more information about this). While a single .sof file may contain both the peripheral and the…

Arria 10: adding support for the Reflex CES R329 board in Linux

February 21, 2019

Xavier Ruppen

Socfpga

No Comments

In this article, I will document the process of porting the latest Linux to an Arria 10 board, the Reflex CES R329, and start it using TFTP. Starting the board Hook the BLASTER micro-usb port to your computer. Power-on the board and connect to it using picocom: Your board will boot to Linux. Before it does, interrupt the boot process by pressing on any key. You’re now in U-boot. The printenv command will show you the saved environment variables. By…

Schematic of the Cyclone V SX SoC Development Board

Socfpga: Everything mainline from the ground up

February 21, 2019

Xavier Ruppen

Socfpga

3 Comments

Altera’s tools for generating U-boot and Linux are a bit messy, outdated at best. For example, last time I checked their auto-generated U-boot dates back to 2014. Let’s try to build and run an up-to-date version of U-boot and Linux. U-boot build First, clone the repository. A variety of defconfigs exist for different boards. For example, building U-boot for the Altera’s Cyclone V development kit: This will result in a u-boot-with-spl.sfp file being created. flash The SoCFPGA boot ROM will…

Running Vivado in the Cloud

September 20, 2018

Rick Wertenbroek

Cloud Computing

6 Comments

Vivado Vivado is one of our main tools when working with FPGAs. However when implementing for big FPGAs such as Kintex/Virtex Ultrascale devices, the processing can take forever when running with a high resource usage. The goal of this article is to show a way to tackle this problem and generate more bitstreams faster. By launching Vivado multiple times in the Cloud on instances of our choice (need 128 CPUs and 2TB of RAM, go ahead, just kidding, but this…

Running Questasim on any OS through Docker

September 12, 2018

Rick Wertenbroek

Virtualization

4 Comments

Questasim When doing HDL simulation Questasim is one of our main tools. However it only runs on Windows and GNU/Linux. Although we mostly use GNU/Linux machines Questasim is not compatible with all distributions. This mainly because of library version compatibility, albeit this being fixable, it is a pain to do (find out which library is the culprit and which version is needed). So creating a Docker image seems like a good solution. It provides a known fixed environment to Questasim…

Link with the parallel version of libstdc++ and take advantage of your multi-core processor “for free”

August 13, 2018

Rick Wertenbroek

HPC

No Comments

Going from a single threaded program to a parallel version is often a major pain, this is however often needed to take full advantage of modern multi-core processors. Having to work with threads, locks, and shared data structures is often difficult due to the non deterministic behavior of the scheduler and the difficulty in debugging the complex problems that can happen with multi-threading. It should be noted that several algorithms in the C++ library already have a parallel implementation. If…

Exploring GNU Radio performance

March 7, 2018

Alberto Dassatti

SDR

2 Comments

Next Friday, March 16th, our University is going to have its annual open day event (if you are close to Yverdon-les-Bains it is a great opportunity to see many interesting projects!). We decided to present an SDR demo: we get a live feed from a professional camera, we use a custom developed encoder, and then we transmit the signal to a receiver, then to a decoder, and finally we display it on a large screen. The whole chain is depicted…

Building a full SDR stack from source for LimeSDR

January 8, 2018

Xavier Ruppen

SDR

13 Comments

Rationale Generally speaking, building from source offers one key advantage: it is the only way to test the latest features offered by the community. Moreover, if you intend to develop or fix bugs (or even help the community fix bugs), you will need to have a working and up-to-date software environment. All in all, compiling LimeSDR’s software stack is fairly straight forward. It is barely a matter of getting the right cmake options. While we want to compile as many…

Cooling the LimeSDR (with IR pictures)

October 30, 2017

Xavier Ruppen

SDR

No Comments

One thing that struck us as well as the community is the overall heat that is cumulating on the LimeSDR. Having worked with the Ettus B210, we were surprised of the 60°C shown in LimeSuite under no significant load. Some were concerned by the premature degradation of the board, but heat may also impact RF performances (chapter 4.4). As such, we decided to take action against what we considered could be a problem. This SDR contains three main chips: a Cypress FX3 CPU,…