- After finding the bug in the reference model and wasting countless hours going back and forth with FPGA timing optimization and bug tweaks, I realized that the design was fundementally broken. The decision to use two clock domains (high speed) and low speed was correct from the beginning. The FPGA is dreadfully slow, (you definitely don't want to do much logic at 300MHz...), but the handoff between tclk and tclk_div4 was too complicated. The puzzle of having to respond to wait quickly, covering the corner cases, and meeting timing was just too ugly.
- The "new" design goes back to the method of using the high speed logic only for doing a "dumb" parallel to serial converter and preparing all the necessary signals in the low speed domain.
- This feel A LOT cleaner and the it already passes basic tests with the chip reference and the loopback after less than 3 hours of redesign work!
- The TX meets timing but there is still some work to do with wait pushback testing.
- Clearing the "done" register with tx_burst. Kind of makes sense logically since while we are in burst mode we are not done.
- Still not 100% happy with this circuit, but there arent' a lot of lines of code left...
- But elink now passes 500 random burst transactions!!!
- reduced frame fanout, removed clock gater in erx_io (improves speed path)
- driving constants on "wid signals" (proper)
- making lock signal 1 bit wide to remove warning
- moved backed to BUFIO for IDDR blocks
- Using the BUFIO makes another clock domain....FPGAs apparently hate clock domain crossings, avoid them at all cost.
- Now moving back to having on high speed clock domain for logic and DDR blocks, take care of IO alignment in software for TX and RX
- Also, fixed the io_wait path with logic...not sure what I was thinking there. Logic was trivial. The way it was,the io path was going straight into the FIFO as a wait.
- Using new packet interface
- Adding active signal, indicating that link is ready. This way you don't need to guess when the link is ready (no magic constants)
- Removed register on por reset input to get rid of x on startup.
- holding rx in reset state until tx is done
- removing reset from all pipeline registers
- removing reset from oddr/iddr
- the idea is to keep things quiet not to block in lots of places. The only real block needed is in the FIFO to keep "noise" from propagating past the link. The link should be kept in a safe reset state until the rx fram is stable and the clock is running so that the pipe can be cleaned out.
