[Discuss-gnuradio] DSPCARD progress

[Darrell Harmon]

I thought I should update the list on my progress on DSPCARD.  I have 
fully assembled a prototype except for the FPGA SDRAM.  The BGA 
soldering was successful using a $20 toaster oven controlled by my 
laptop.  I would encourage anyone else out there to consider using BGA 
parts in their designs.  They are not so bad, and it was definitely 
worth the trouble for the XC3S1000.  I have the DSP running code 
compiled with GCC.  I have done register reads and writes to the USB 
chip, but have not sent or received any USB traffic yet (Still waiting 
on USB2.0 card to show up).  Power consumption with no activity in the 
FPGA and the DSP clock at 390MHz is 250mA @3.3V.

I have configured the FPGA.  The programmer board contains a DAC904 (14 
bits 160MHz DAC) and ADS831E (8 bits 80MHz ADC) for testing purposes.  I 
have generated some waveforms using the DAC and also piped the ADC input 
out the DAC.  It might make a nice scope/function generator demo.  I 
will be doing a real ADC/DAC board later with 2x LTC2299 and a MAX5893.

The only problem I am having so far is figuring out how to get ld to put 
instructions and data in seperate files so I can use instruction/data 
SRAM.  It runs much faster that way, but it is not possible to fetch 
data from instruction SRAM.  Hopefully I will get that one resolved with 
reading more man pages.

I look forward to getting this thing interfaced to GNUradio.  Any 
questions are welcome.

--
Darrell Harmon
100x100mm SBC running GNU/Linux:
http://dlharmon.com/sbc.html