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gschuell's avatar
gschuell
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2 years ago

Arria 10 HPS EMIF DDR3 Calibration Failure

I am bringing up a custom Arria 10 SX board and have been running into issues with getting my DDR3 SODIMM to calibrate when connected to the HPS EMIF conduit. The EMIF example design calibrates pro...
AdzimZM_Altera's avatar
AdzimZM_Altera
Icon for Regular Contributor rankRegular Contributor
2 years ago

Hi Greg,


Thank you for the update on your tests.


On our custom board, it looks like we pass the traffic generator test when we are operating in quarter rate user clock mode, but in half rate user clock mode we don't get any result from the traffic generator test (no pass, fail, or timeout). Do you have any idea what could cause this? I would at least expect a fail or timeout if there was an issue detected during the calibration.

  • I'm not aware of this issue that occur when using half rate clock mode.
  • Maybe you can try to run with a few seed and check if that can give another result.
  • But so far the calibration is always passing in all board which is means that the memory interface should be working fine on the board.


Also, when I step through the U-Boot SPL code in the debugger on the HPS design, I am seeing the code jump to an error handler that says to "hang forever" very close to a comment that says that the MPFE hang workaround should be complete. This looks like it would be just before or possibly during DDR calibration. The MPFE seems to refer to the "Multi-port Front End" memory arbiter. Any ideas what could cause this?


Regards,

Adzim


  • gschuell's avatar
    gschuell
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    2 years ago

    Hi Adzim,

    Thank you for your response. To the best of my knowledge, I am creating the bootloader per the Rocketboards guidelines but it would be very helpful to communicate directly with someone that is familiar with this flow (especially for custom hardware).

    You mentioned that you were in contact with someone from the Embedded team. Would it be possible to have them contact me directly at this point?

    We have been fighting this problem for quite a while and we can not make any further progress with our board bringup or software development until this is resolved.

    Thanks,

    Greg