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Altera_Forum
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12 years ago

TSE not transmitting in Cyclone V

I have a working design using the TSE core that is implemented in an Arria Gx II speed grade -5 which we implemented into Quartus 11.1 SOPC system. I have ported the design into a Cyclone V E speed grade -8 (5CEFA7U19C8ES) using Quartus 12.1SP1 SOPC system which is not working. In this new design, the gate array is alive and we are able to run the firmware (tested via LED test points) and we are receiving Tx_CLK (25 Mhz) successfully however when I tried to send constant packets of data there are no messages sent out. I checked the m_tx_en_from_the_triple_speed_ethernet and never becomes active. I copied the exact same SDC file from the original design. I also downloaded the dp7 patch that was meant to fix timing issues. Does anyone have any ideas ?

6 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    12 years ago

    How is your system designed? Are you using a CPU and software, or are you sending your packets directly to the core? How is it initialized? Do you see any activity on the TSE's tx avalon stream input?

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    12 years ago

    I am using a NIOS connected to an on-chip Memory. From there I have connected a Scatter Gather DMA Controller(Transfer Mode:Memory-to-stream). The SG-DMA is then connected to the TSE. This configuration we have duplicated for both the Rx and the Tx.

    We send the packets to the core via this SG-DMA

    We have successfully initialized the TSE core registers

    We have not checked the Rx yet we are focusing first on the Tx
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    12 years ago

    So could you check the tx stream between the DMA and the TSE with signaltap?

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    12 years ago

    In our previous design it basically worked and we didn't have to do too much debug.

    Please could you explain how to do this ?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    12 years ago

    You were lucky then, it is rare that an Ethernet design works straight out of the box ;)

    Have you ever used Signaltap? With the node finder you can navigate into the SOPC system and find the avalon stream signals. The most important ones are ready, available, start/end of packet and data.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    12 years ago

    Thanks for your help, in the end the firmware guy found that he had put the wrong header file. The system now transmits. We haven't checked Rx but it is a carbon copy so it should be relatively straight forward.