Re: adding files to top-level with rhea

On 12/21/15 10:05 AM, Edward Vidal wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> Yosys & arachne-pnr appear to work very well compared to Xilinx ISE.
> It takes 2:41 to generate xula2.bit, while it only takes 0:35 to
> generate the catboard.bin.
>

Not to diminish the efforts of the open-source
synthesis and PaR but run-time is a small
benefit when compared to the resource and
timing results.  In other-words, if the flow
executes quickly but uses twice as many
resources it isn't a good comparison.

> On the RPi2B with CAT-Board the first 2 leds appeared to always be on.
> See the changes to blink.py in the file attached chgs_blink.txt.
> I choose 12000000 since the freq. on my XulA2-LX9 is 12000000 Hz.
> Using 1440000 on the XulA2-LX9 would be 8.333333 times.
> Now, 2 leds on XulA2-LX9 with StickIt-MB and RPi2B appear to blink at
> the same rate as leds on CAT-Board with RPi2B.
>

I haven't looked at your code, one thing you
might want to do is verify your design works
with the IceCub2 as well as Yosys+Ar, in
my testing I have had icestick designs work
with IceCube and not with Yosys.  I plan on
adding the IceCub2 flow to the rhea.build but
it is farther down on my list of things to do.

> I generated the docs in both html & latexpdf formats.
>
> Running make in rhea/test appears to work okay.
> The test_models/test_fx2_model.py just hangs up. Should the be expected
> at this point?

Yes, there seems to be an issue with py.test
that I haven't figured out yet.  If you run
`make test` it will run all the same tests
but not using py.test.

>
> In the file ex_xula2.py I added the flow.add_files line.
>      flow.add_files('jpeg_cat.v')
>      flow.run()
> Running ISE I see the file jpeg_cat.v is now part of the project.
> What do I need to do, to have jpeg_cat.v instantiated in the xula2.v?
> Or do I have to do this manually?

You have to do this manually, there is an
undocumented (beta) feature that might help
(`verilog_instance`) otherwise the documented
approach is to us `verilog_code` and create a
wrapper for the module you want instantiate.


>
> Does anyone have a MyHDL or Verilog for a DCM?
> I have been using the one in Xess VHDL_Lib
>

I have been slowly adding some vendor agnostic
primitives to rhea, one of these is a clock
manager (PLL/DCM/MMCM):
https://github.com/cfelton/rhea/blob/master/examples/boards/de0nano_soc/device_primitives/de0nano_soc_device_prims.py#L20

But I have only limited testing, you might
not want to use it unless you are willing to
debug and make changes.

Regards,
Chris



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