Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorYes, I totally get the whole overview 2 posts above.
But I have no plan to use SOPC or Avalon, partly because I don't want to be tied to them, and partly because there are implementations out there I can model on that don't pre-req any or all of that. If I had been designing a new system from scratch, for a real commercial purpose, then perhaps I'd be more inclined to use these tools, which seem to be step up a level in productivity. My problem is as was originally stated, how to pre-load various forms of memory on the DE1 card, as simply as possible, given my current tooling. Once, its in there, given the pre-existing success of others, I think my design should work fine. Yes, I may need some wait state logic if I am to use Flash, but the Z80 (and thus T80) should support that fine. I do appreciate that ModelSim etc are important. Although its an 8-bit micro, the ROM+RAM requirements are non-trivial in terms of size. So although I could put a small boot ROM into M4K, and although that could copy from Flash to SRAM, I would still need a lot of content initially loaded to Flash. The SDRAM controller thought I had was this: The mechanism to load SDRAM might involve a special .pof downloaded to the FPGA (isn't that how Control Panel works?), and this could include refresh logic. But then I'd need to download my real .pof, also with refresh, and I'm wondering how long the SDRAM lasts before losing content, in the period in which the new .pof is being programmed into the FPGA. Anyway, this aspect is less important. {{{ Andy
