4DSP Products Technical support

Hello,
I want to use " [b]FMC204 Cards[/b] " (Digital to Analog Converters) in my design based Xilinx's "[b]KC705 kintex-7 kit[/b]" board.
I have seen the reference design provided by the 4 DSP for evaluating the card and I want to use my own inputs to the DAC instead of those provided by the design and want to merge my own design in that.
My problem is that I don’t want to use the Ethernet interface provided in the reference design to configure the DAC using commands and I don’t want to use the steller IP tool for my development. So please tell me that among the reference design components

[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]Sip_router,
[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][/size][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]sip_cid,
[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][/size][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]sip_i2c_master,
[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][/size][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]sip_cmd_mux
[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][/size][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]sip_mac_engine
[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][/size][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]sip_fmc_ct_gen
[font=Symbol]·[font=Times New Roman][/size][size=7pt]        [/size][/font][/font]sip_fmc_204
which component is of my use(I think it should be sip_fmc_ct_gen and sip_fmc_204 only) and how can I utilize them in my own design without having dependency on other components?
Initially I want to use an DDS output Sine and Cosine waves to feed as input to the FMC204 DAC card instead of the reference wave provided in reference design.Is there any document(other than pdfs provided with the design) which provides the complete design detail of the reference design provided so that after understanding that , I can change that according to my requirements?
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Thanks
Sugandh Mishra

Dear Sir,


You don't need to use StellarIP if you don't want. Actually you can simply generate your Xilinx ISE firmware using StellarIP and forget about StellarIP if you wish. As far as dependencies are requires, don't have inter dependencies. There are all using generic buses (wormholes).


We don't have extra documentation but you have a star documentation and star documentations, a firmware source code and a software source code. Coupled with the FMC204 user manual you have all the element to design your own firmware, many other customers succeeded doing that. Some other customers decided to contact 4DSP to provide them with a reference design more suited to their needs.


These things are generally discussed with our sales department.


I hope having informed you sufficiently


Best Regards,
Arnaud

Thanks Arnaud for your reply!


It would be really nice if you tell that from which source the digital input is being fed to the FMC204 Card (either from host PC via Ethernet or generated on board) and what is the format of that data?


If I want to use my own signal (which is 16 bit SINE and COSINE wave samples coming out of a DDS core) how would I be able to feed this signal into my DAC card(which are the places where design changes are needed)?As I want to customize this design according to my own needs..




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Thanks &regards,
Ms. Sugandh

Hello,


i have the same problem with "sugandh".
I have my own real time signals (4 signals (16 bit each) that are sampled at 250 msps). How can i insert those signals to the refence design?
[font=Verdana][/font]
Thank you for your help.[font=Verdana][/size][size=78%] [/size][/font]

It sounds like what you actually want is a simple BSP package for the 4DSP board you bought, with simple busses to the data channels, and a register interface for the controls. 4DSP does not really provide this. They instead provide a package based on Stellar IP. You can take the output of the stellar IP, which is a VHDL design and project for Xilinx software, and modify it to your liking. This is a fairly hard process that will require expertise with FPGA design, and is not for the faint of heart. While 4DSP claim that everything is provided to do this, I have found that there are several NGC files that prevent you from seeing the whole design. There is little to no documentation for the functionality, so you have to read there code and figure out what they are doing. You may also need to read there C code to figure out what you need to do to initialize your design. With all those caveats, it looks like the sip_FMC_204 contains the part of the code that you want to start with. Hope this helps.

 

From the software perspective there are two areas that the software initializes:

1.  Individual chip configuration (DAC, ADC, clock chip, etc.)  These are based on the HW chipset and documentation for these are available from the individual companies.   The software initializes it to certain values based on the reference design of the firmware.

2.  Firmware initializations - these include any type of timing adjustment that are needed for DAC and ADC (to sync the lines up), the triggering/burst/dma mechanisms, etc.

If you choose to bypass stellar ip, you will still need to initialize the chips on the board one way or another.   That in itself could be fairly complex especially when it relates to the clock chip initialization and certain DAC or ADC chips may have near 100 registers.    Without using software which communicates through the Ethernet to dynamically change these values when you're changing clock, etc. then you will be faced with having to recompile your design each time and that can be very time consuming versus 10 seconds recompiling C code.


Tony