Nimish, Thanks. My colleagues are planning on doing exactly what you mentioned: programming ROACH2 KatADCs with the 11.5 tools we had used to previously and successfully program ROACH1.
The advice I would give them after hearing this discussion is as follows: [*] build the design with their current toolflow, make sure it compiles, and then observe the internal KatADC snaps to see if the error Dale's error is recreated. [*] If so, update the mlib_devel to the latest (simple, fast, may work). [*] If error persists, upgrade to Xilinx 14.x toolflow which should yield success (extrapolated from the 13.x success presented in the initial email). Is that the correct summary? I can have them try and report back on this issue as to where they exited this "if/then" statement. --Laura PS - my sincere apologies, Dale, for calling you Gary, earlier, I am just jealous of nice, short last names that are human-readable On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Nimish Sane <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Laura, > > No. The one with 11.5 used an old commit > 1c2035ed9e4f4bcc98e9f08f2722d34dd4f10872 (Nov 12, 2012) from ska-sa. > > I believe Dave M used the latest one from casper-astro (waiting for his > answer). > > So, as a caveat to what Dale has mentioned in his email, the problem could > be between yellow blocks and not necessarily the toolflow, though I do not > know if yellow block has changed significantly. > > Thanks, > > Nimish > > > On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Vertatschitsch, Laura E. < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Gary, >> >> Can you confirm the same mlib_devel checkout was used for both compiles? >> >> --Laura >> >> >> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Gary, Dale E. <[email protected]>wrote: >> >>> Hi All, >>> >>> I am not sure how many out there are using or planning to use the KatADC >>> boards in their projects, but I thought I would report on our experience, >>> which contains a warning: Do not use Xilinx version 11.x for ROACH2 >>> development that includes KatADC. We started with that version, and did >>> not want to slow development by upgrading. However, snap blocks that >>> capture the ADC time-domain output showed numerous "glitches" like that >>> shown in the attached file. The top plot shows the histogram of the two >>> ADC channels on a single KatADC board, while the middle plot shows the >>> time-domain data. The green channel was behaving well, but the blue >>> channel shows many glitches, both positive and negative. The behavior >>> changes whenever the ROACHes are reloaded, so that which channels are >>> affected can change, and can be better or worse at different times. >>> >>> We created a test design to demonstrate the problem, compiled on 11.x, >>> and then asked Dave MacMahon to compile the same model again on Xilinx >>> system generator 13.3. We found that when the new bof file is loaded there >>> is no sign of the glitches. We are now upgrading to 14.5, and will report >>> our experience with that later. >>> >>> There may be other reasons not to use 11.x on ROACH2, but we did not see >>> any other problems, including earlier tests with iADC boards. It was only >>> when we began using the KatADCs that we saw these anomalies. >>> >>> Regards, >>> Dale >>> >> >> >
