Hi All. As you may know a new CASPER board is in the pipeline called ROACH 2. The design is centred around a Xilinx Virtex-6 SX475T FPGA. It should be, roughly, a 4-times improvement in terms of overall performance over ROACH 1.
Well, the board arrived from assembly just under a week ago and I have been working at trying to get it to do stuff (other than emit smoke). The board now boots into uboot, we can JTAG in an FPGA bitstream and the PowerPC can successfully "talk" to the FPGA. The FTDI USB to JTAG + serial works like a charm (which is lucky because neither the Xilinx and Macraigor programmer play along with the JTAG chain). So hopefully progress will be good over the coming weeks so we can start making lots of these board soon;) The wiki page is hopelessly out of date, but includes some more information about ROACH 2: http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/ROACH2 I have also uploaded a video of the board in action for your enjoyment. You can view the video directly here: http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/images/d/d1/Roach2_knight_rider.mpg Expect more updates on the casper lists and the wiki soon. All the best, David -- David George Karoo Array Telescope Tel: +27 11 442-2434 Email: [email protected]
