Peripherals On Demand

[Fabien Marteau-2]

Hello,

I'm a member of the ARMadeus development team, this company designs embedded
systems based on ARM processors (i.MX) and FPGA (Spartan) and it's proud to
announce the availability of its news card named apf27 (description can be
found here
:http://www.armadeus.com/english/products-processor_boards-apf27.html).

To ease FPGA usage for software developers, a GPL command line tool
(POD) has been written which can connect automatically severals
"virtual" components together by means of a Wishbone bus.

The specification of  POD can be found here:
http://www.armadeus.com/wiki/index.php?title=POD_specification
(from fpga wiki page : http://www.armadeus.com/wiki/index.php?title=Using_FPGA)

The main goal of POD is to permit FPGA-newbies to use fpga without writing any
VHDL (or verilog) code. The user can choose component he wants in a components
library and include it in his project.  POD will generate automatically the
"glue-files" to produce the FPGA configuration bitstream for the fpga (wishbone
intercon, top VHDL hierarchy,tcl script to automatize synthesis, pinout files,
...) and the drivers on the OS side (if component has drivers templates for the OS).

The principle of POD is to package HDL components in a directory together with
a component description file (XML).  Code/Drivers template can be added in to
automatize drivers generation for target operating system that will use
projects components.  Code/driver templates can be easily added

Currently few components are integrated in POD:

* bram: just for test, instanciate spartan ram
* button : manage a user button generating interrupts
* led : manage a simple led with a register
* simplegpio : a minimalistic input/output manager
* irq_mngr : this components manage interrupts from fpga to processor.

And some come from opencore:

* I2C master
* uart16550

POD is designed to be used with other platforms than the Armadeus ones.
Actually 3 platforms are supported:  2 ARM-Spartan architectures
(Armadeus APF9328 and APF27 boards) and one Atmega-Cyclone architecure
named UNIOC

POD is also designed to support other bus than Wishbone. Actually POD supports
two simples versions of the Wishbone bus: one version with a 16bits data bus
(iMX) and an other with a 8 bits data bus (Atmega)

The source code of POD is released in GPL and can be found on sourceforge
repository:
http://periphondemand.sourceforge.net/

It is theoretically usable on any operating system (written in Python)
but it has only been tested on a Linux/Debian distribution

A use case tutorial can be found on wiki, to explain the usage of POD:
http://www.armadeus.com/wiki/index.php?title=POD_Tutorial

If you are interested by this project feel free to register on sourceforge
mailing list :
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/periphondemand-devel

Cheers
Fabien Marteau
fabien.marteau@...

_______________________________________________
http://www.opencores.org/mailman/listinfo/cores

[John Griessen-3]

Fabien Marteau wrote:
> The main goal of POD is to permit FPGA-newbies to use fpga without writing
> any
> VHDL (or verilog) code.

Could be a speed up tool for some purposes.  Does it generate intermediate code in VHDL or verilog  2001
to feed into the "external proprietary software" to synthetize and configure the FPGA?  VHDL is hinted in fig 2. of the spec.

Your spec says, "several simulation libraries can be used to ease testbench writing."  Is icarus verilog one of them?

John Griessen
--
Ecosensory   Austin TX
_______________________________________________
http://www.opencores.org/mailman/listinfo/cores

[Fabien Marteau-2]

Could be a speed up tool for some purposes?

Yes, it speed up component assembly. If your components are ready in library, you can make a final bitstream fastly.
 

  Does it generate intermediate code in VHDL or verilog  2001
to feed into the "external proprietary software" to synthetize and configure the FPGA?

For this moment, it generate only VHDL intermediate code. But it designed to be multi-language then Verilog can be added in tool.
 

 VHDL is hinted in fig 2. of the spec.

Yes, because only VHDL is supported for this moment.

Your spec says, "several simulation libraries can be used to ease testbench writing."  Is icarus verilog one of them?

To add a third party simulation software, specific code for the tool must be added in directory periphondemand/toolchain/simulation/. But for this moment POD doesn't generate Verilog code.

Fabien Marteau

_______________________________________________
http://www.opencores.org/mailman/listinfo/cores