You're doing the Lord's work here! I'm not to FPGAs yet, but I keep studying them for when I move on from STM32. Your videos are invaluable for circuit design, generally, and not just FPGA. I'm so grateful for your presence in our lives!
Although I've worked in electronics for over a decade, this year I designed my first PCB and just for a personal project. I've come to enjoy the process of laying out, it feels like SimCity did back in my youth.
When the project is completed, maybe consider making that FPGA M2 accelerator available as an "off the shelf" product on Farnell or other electronics distributors. Currently, there is no cheap hobby/home use FPGA accelerator. The closest to that would be Digilent's Arty7 (at about 170 euros) but it's rather a development board than an accelerator. Make it easy for the host CPU to communicate with it, and a lot of coders will have tons of fun doing some Verilog or VHDL with it ! :)
@@oliverer3 I'd get it for 200-250 bucks. 300-400 is strechind it, but I'm a cheapskate. It looks like a great IC development board even if you're not using it for accelerating any workloads from the host system.
you guys dont know about the sipeed tang series? tang nano 9k is like 20€ and can already do quite a lot of stuff. highly recommend. the nano 20k is bigger and has a nice development kit for like 60€.
Litefury and nitefury-II are basically same thing but with a huge A7 (100 and 200 respectively iirc) . Both on Amazon for under $160 or so - which is less than a raw A200 chip would cost !
I second that. A good way to complete the board would be some PCIE driver code on the host, and finally the necessary implementation on the FPGA itself. I remember PCIe had some required registers to implement but the overall architecture is a little fuzzy to me. A complete guide would be invaluable!
“Phil’s Lab” needs a “Phil’s Kit” store so your loyal subscribers can purchase the products of your hard work. A year ago I hardly knew anything related to electronics, RF, etc. Your channel has played a huge part in bringing me into the light. Great content, fast paced, very watchable. I hope you take some time to sleep. Thanks for the videos
Thank you very much for your kind comment, Jason! Awesome to hear that the videos have helped out on the electronics side. For now, the courses are all I'm offering in my "Phil's Kit" store I'm afraid. Selling hardware would probably mean even less sleep :D
@@PhilsLab I plan on taking a few of your courses in the near future. I really want to try to taking something from idea to finished product. That being said, what do you think of the feasibility of using an M.2 slot as the dedicated interface for an RTL-SDR receiver? Or , beyond , as the interface for a “yet to be named” SDR transceiver? I have a list of questions but I’ll leave them for another time. Thanks for all the great content and for taking the time out of your busy schedule to respond to your viewers comments and questions. Hardly any of the Channel owners do anymore. Thanks again!
Judging by Phil's progress since I subscribed, in two years, I expect to see a video on how to design a smartphone board or something for a space satellite.
Wow, you are a god and a genius. Would like to make this someday to off load AI/ML acceleration tasks. I read many papers stating that FPGAs are much faster in matrix multiplication than GPUs even with tensor cores. This design would save so much time in brainstorming to design one. Thanks. Edit: Thank you for making a FPGA high speed course, I have been looking on google and no such course exits, will definitely join the course.
This is fantastic! I would love to see a video designing around the coral/google TPU edge accelerator. I think it would be quite difficult since you need a 64 bit processor running embedded linux.
Love the tag connect programming headers, we use the 6 and 10 pin versions for various MCU and FPGA designs. They even have a “legless” version so you don’t have to route around the leg mounting holes
The Tag Connect stuff is great! I used the 'legged' version here, as the no-leg retainer clip on the back wouldn't fit when then board is in the M2 socket.
Depending on your FPGA's BGA pitch, if you use round pads on the bottom you can fit 0402 decouplers between the pins. This allows more to be located where you'd prefer them. Good video. 👍
I must say, this video is excellent, you explain your process of thinking quite well, and throw in nuggets of information that is quite useful. Right on man, keep it up!
Last year I had to design my first ever board, and it was going to be populated with this exact FPGA. I was thrown in the deep end suffice it to say haha, wish this video existed then. Also unrelated but still related, your videos in general have helped and taught me so much since I found your channel last year! Keep doing the lords work man 👍
Will there be a video on the software side of things? It would be interesting to get an overview of the PCI-E driver and other software parts on the host side.
Amazing. This is way, way, way out of my league, but you made it interesting despite me not knowing what was going on most of the time. It blows my mind that people are this smart.
Thanks a lot for your highly professional experience sharing. It is rare in TH-cam. For sure, Altium Academy rocks, but nice to see also user experience. As HW developer, I know how many discussions and best practice sharing could be in this field.
Interesting board and loads of useful information and tips as always! The board reminds me of the Acorn CLE-215 which was intended for some crypto mining application but never took off. I think it had an Artix7 200T and were apparently available cheap on ebay a few years back although I've never managed to get my hands on one. People did some quite interesting things with them including running LiteX RiscV designs.
Thank you so much for your exhaustive tutorials Phil ... Keep up the nice work you're doing for the TH-cam electronic community... To ♾️ and "so forth" 😅❤
I was happy with my laptop, loved it. Single M.2 slot, all I needed. And then I saw this... Now I need a newer laptop, with second M.2 slot. You rotten swine, you (reference to classic radio comedy, The Goon Show)
mPCIe also includes a USB2 connection on the card edge connector (And even has pins for SIM-cards to be used, in the case of cellular modems.). I'm not sure if they could be used simultaneously. So, if you plan on ever doing a re-revision of your PCB, you might be able to put a USB to JTAG bridge directly on your board for programming and debugging while the card is installed, without needing an external JTAG interface unless you're doing extremely high speed stuff.
That would be a nice solution but again you will be limited by the number of pcie lanes since mPCIe provide x1 lanes and this card is designed with x4 pcie lanes
Future video suggestion... plugging in, powering up and using FPGA + PCIe board, drivers, software tool chains for programming the FPGA. Several use cases: ML use case, offloading compute, system monitoring of compute time reduced compared to no FPGA... board cost compared to other manufacturer equiv FPGA chip...
This looks like a very, very good layout. Great work! The only place I would have made some extra effort is on the feedback of the DC/DC converter. As it's working at very high Fcy (>2MHz), feedback will be VERY sensitive to noise. A star connection to pin 24 "Analog Ground" can help reducing sensitivity to noise. Even more important when you're doing railway/military/automotive designs sitting in high EM fields environment.
Hey phil, how do you find this pin propagation delay for this fpga? Im designing a similar board and i try to check in the ibis model but i dont find it. Nice board btw!!
Nice design! Did you create the schematic symbol of the artix 7 by yourself? Especially the decoupling networks are very clean. I don't really like the power page, it's kind of unstructured. Greets from a hw dev.
I just started your Mixed signal IC course, and I'd love an FPGA hardware design. The most I've done with FPGAs is HDL (Verliog/VHDL), but it would be awesome learn how they are designed as well!
Hi Phil, will you be covering the software stack for communicating with the FPGA from Linux or Windows? I think that's also a fairly important aspect of custom FPGA hardware accelerators in commodity laptops/PC's. Thanks.
For a few minutes, I thought this is Phil's Computer Lab... and was wondering why the voice is a bit different, and is the FPGA going to be used for retro emulation acceleration or something....
Altium seems very capable .. I've been using Cadence for over 10 years and Mentor before that .. Now I've been playing with KiCad and EasyEDA but very limited support with hdi uVias
What's a real world use case where a 60 layer PCB would be used? The biggest I've ever seen was a small form factor dual socket motherboard with 16 layers and that seems crazy.
Amazing! Would it be possible to get the sources for this? Would be useful to use it unmodified for some purposes. If you want/need help, I can help with the Linux driver side, or even simpler testing with memory maps without the driver initially - I've previously worked with Xilinx Spartan 6 and Zynq, and Altera Stratix IV devices.
Phil ... I have been following your videos for a while. Decided to have a go with an STM32F411 Black Pill... the mistake I made was choosing an USB Audio endpoint as my first source. It worked, except... that I2S PLL Clock setting becomes a real pain in the backside as the USB endpoint will happily send you perfect 48K but your I2S master clock is off by 0.5%. It means your buffers will over/under run and you will get DMA buffer colisons which sound like scifi sound effects. I would love to see a video explaining how to do frame dup/drop mechanics to "reclock" a stream :) I mean even if you get an I2S master clock which is exactly 48K, it will still drift around over time, so the problem can't be pushed out forever.
This is really cool, nice discussion and documentation of the PCB design, the electronics design community definitely lacks this. What kind of projects do you think you could use this for ?
This hardware screams out for an open source HDL design for partial reconfiguration of the 7-series FPGA over PCIe. Do you know of an example project that does that?
I've done this for the Artix 7 75T. It's referred to as Tandem with Field Updates. It's a very advanced FPGA design methodology, so I wouldn't recommend attempting unless youre familiar with FPGA development. There are example projects included with the PCIe IP in Vivado.
Excellent video, as are your others. How do you decide on whether to terminate DDR3 address lines or not? I've seen it done and not done (on reliable products), and conflicting information, so erred on the side of caution when I had a project on a tight timeline. This added cost for the Vtt rail and power dissipation so I would have liked to omit. Thanks.
Great video as allays. 1 How more precisely did you chose that buck IC + how did you size is vs the nominal and max current draw? 2 Why you didn't immediately go down in the inner layers with those PCIe signals? 3 Heat dissipation, i know FPGAs are power hungry so can that BGA pack dissipate enough ? Especially since it is going inside a laptop or PC (or maybe an RPI or a custom SBC) ? OR you considered a heat-sink before and it is not shown here? 4 For what project is this FGPA board? (if you can disclose it since it may be a company secret) 5 Regarding the course, maybe since we are getting into super advanced stuff and the part where it is hard to follow all the things for a personal hobby project, if it is for work i may need to do in the future probably since i love your teaching style. 6 Why did you need a custom stack up ? As in why the normal one for a 0.8mm 8 layer board was not proper ? This may be a bit much so dont answer 7 if it is to personal : 7 How do you find companies that do so many interesting projects? And how do you get accepted in?
Because the CSG325 package XC7A35T chip is too expensive, after watching your video, I also started to use the FGG484 package chip to make the M.2 size board, please ask where can I download the source file of the PCB in the video, I want to refer to learn, thanks.
The next thing I would ask you if that was able to have that kind of setup could you just get a SSD based PCI Express board that has multiple spots for the ssds towards to put more than one of these processor accelerators onto it?
Love the DDR layout! Man though, if I could find some way to actually get my hands on FPGAs as a hobbiest that would be awesome, unfortunately I have to rely on work to buy me toys for now. Where did you source your A7?
yeah good luck getting one with less than a year lead time. Digi-key says that the FPGA that Phil used, the XC7A35T-2FGG484I will be in stock on 4 Jan 2024
I have a few questions: 1. Would it be possible to execute the FPGA's function through a function call in C/C++? Lets say there is a cryptographic algorithm that has been baked into the FPGA's function and you wanted to execute that algorithm via the HOST machine through C code. Is that possible? 2. Do you plan to make this a consumer product? 3. If yes, do you have an ETA on the development tools and the M.2 FPGA? 4. If yes, how much would it cost in USD/CAD? [Edit] I think i've found out that you have to use OpenCL to interface with FPGAs via C/C++. Now the question is: 1. Can the same Xilinx OpenCL drivers be used with your implementation of the FPGA?
For me that just makes me ask one more crazier question since fpgas cost more than normal is it possible to make a variant with any Arm based processor?
Hello - for propagation delay - exporting values from Vivado are for example in this format Min Trace Delay (ps) Max Trace Delay (ps) A10 RSVDGND 27.853 28.133 A3 GNDADC 31.635 31.953 A4 VCCADC 30.131 30.434 A6 VREFP 27.116 27.389 A7 DXP 20.476 20.682 A8 M0_0 25.429 25.684 Would really want to understand how to use above min/max from Vivado in Altium Thanks
I'm very much a noob in electronics so pardon the dumb question: 7:00 isn't the pull-up resistor (R203) setting the PG1 to normally high already? so wouldn't it be permanently enabling EN2?
Very neat board, I was really looking forward to you featuring it in a video. Did PCBWAY complain about how the FPGA spans edge to edge with no clearance? Also, it would be great if you show us a board with an HDI stackup. I would really like to see how you specify blind/buried vias and how you stagger them.
I typically match all signals within a group - overall, it isn't too much extra effort. However, you should be able to get away with not matching some signals as strictly (NCS and NRESET). Check out NXP's AN3940 for example or Xilinx 7 Series PCB Design Guide for more detail.
I'm not a dev of any sort, hardware or software, and I understand that this is an accelerator of sorts, but for what sorts of things would this be used for?
Would this help regarding rendering 3D models and CAD files on a laptop that has Radeon built in graphics on a Ryzen 7 chip? Sadly my laptop is good at sketching since its a 2n1 with a stylus but it really chugs when it comes to rendering 3D models. I sometimes wish I would have gotten a laptop with Thunderbolt 4 support just for the external graphics card option but I have to play with the cards I'm dealt (or buy a new deck?)
Having done pretty heavy developpement with Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGAs for some years I can confirm this guy knows what he does! A very nice board man 👍
Thank you very much - glad you approve! :)
Facts. Dude is a real computer engineer nerd, gotta admit it.
@@PhilsLab : Heh...some of us know what you are doing there. I just wish I had another M.2 slot on my machine to run with a toy like this.
this guy fucks!
What was your Virtex 6 FPGA application?
You're doing the Lord's work here! I'm not to FPGAs yet, but I keep studying them for when I move on from STM32. Your videos are invaluable for circuit design, generally, and not just FPGA. I'm so grateful for your presence in our lives!
Thank you very much for watching! :)
Although I've worked in electronics for over a decade, this year I designed my first PCB and just for a personal project.
I've come to enjoy the process of laying out, it feels like SimCity did back in my youth.
When the project is completed, maybe consider making that FPGA M2 accelerator available as an "off the shelf" product on Farnell or other electronics distributors. Currently, there is no cheap hobby/home use FPGA accelerator. The closest to that would be Digilent's Arty7 (at about 170 euros) but it's rather a development board than an accelerator. Make it easy for the host CPU to communicate with it, and a lot of coders will have tons of fun doing some Verilog or VHDL with it ! :)
Difficult to make it cheap, especially small scale.
That FPGA alone is a €100 part.
@@oliverer3 I'd get it for 200-250 bucks. 300-400 is strechind it, but I'm a cheapskate. It looks like a great IC development board even if you're not using it for accelerating any workloads from the host system.
you guys dont know about the sipeed tang series? tang nano 9k is like 20€ and can already do quite a lot of stuff. highly recommend. the nano 20k is bigger and has a nice development kit for like 60€.
Litefury and nitefury-II are basically same thing but with a huge A7 (100 and 200 respectively iirc) . Both on Amazon for under $160 or so - which is less than a raw A200 chip would cost !
@@はいこれはロボ子の婚約者I find that the speed with which Tang builds bitstreams is INSANE. Designs that take 15 min in vivado are done in 70 sec in gowin
I’d be really interested in your implementation of the host-side pci driver. Will you be covering this on the channel?
I second that. A good way to complete the board would be some PCIE driver code on the host, and finally the necessary implementation on the FPGA itself. I remember PCIe had some required registers to implement but the overall architecture is a little fuzzy to me. A complete guide would be invaluable!
Yes, I'll do that once I've written and tested the implementation!
@@PhilsLab Awesome, looking forward to it!
Xilinx provides some pretty well done drivers stock, and they work with their free IP cores!
Just be aware that while booting the system you need to have a PCIe core running inside the FPGA so that BIOS can detect the card.
Glad to see my M.2 footprint templates were useful. That is a really cool board you made there!
“Phil’s Lab” needs a “Phil’s Kit” store so your loyal subscribers can purchase the products of your hard work. A year ago I hardly knew anything related to electronics, RF, etc. Your channel has played a huge part in bringing me into the light. Great content, fast paced, very watchable. I hope you take some time to sleep. Thanks for the videos
Thank you very much for your kind comment, Jason! Awesome to hear that the videos have helped out on the electronics side.
For now, the courses are all I'm offering in my "Phil's Kit" store I'm afraid. Selling hardware would probably mean even less sleep :D
@@PhilsLab I plan on taking a few of your courses in the near future. I really want to try to taking something from idea to finished product. That being said, what do you think of the feasibility of using an M.2 slot as the dedicated interface for an RTL-SDR receiver? Or , beyond , as the interface for a “yet to be named” SDR transceiver? I have a list of questions but I’ll leave them for another time. Thanks for all the great content and for taking the time out of your busy schedule to respond to your viewers comments and questions. Hardly any of the Channel owners do anymore. Thanks again!
Your evolution video after video is impressive, great job!
Thank you very much, Thomas - hope it isn't downhill from here :D
Judging by Phil's progress since I subscribed, in two years, I expect to see a video on how to design a smartphone board or something for a space satellite.
@@km-electronics1 "...and here's how we construct the phased array antennas and microwave emitters to construct a simple Starlink like design"
Wow, you are a god and a genius. Would like to make this someday to off load AI/ML acceleration tasks. I read many papers stating that FPGAs are much faster in matrix multiplication than GPUs even with tensor cores. This design would save so much time in brainstorming to design one. Thanks. Edit: Thank you for making a FPGA high speed course, I have been looking on google and no such course exits, will definitely join the course.
What a beautiful board!
Thank you, Jonathan!
Do you mean Phil's engineering work or made-in-China PCB work specifically ?!...
Very neat components placement.
1st King Philip's reality show :)
I can't wait to see the course.
Thanks for the great content.
keep up great work!
Haha thanks, Mustafa!
This is fantastic! I would love to see a video designing around the coral/google TPU edge accelerator. I think it would be quite difficult since you need a 64 bit processor running embedded linux.
Wow, this is incredibly impressive. Well done! I'm in awe.
Thanks, Esra!
Love the tag connect programming headers, we use the 6 and 10 pin versions for various MCU and FPGA designs. They even have a “legless” version so you don’t have to route around the leg mounting holes
The Tag Connect stuff is great! I used the 'legged' version here, as the no-leg retainer clip on the back wouldn't fit when then board is in the M2 socket.
Very impressive project and board 👏 👏 👏
Thank you, Nicola!
Thanks for the great content! My headache of choosing a buck converter is gone :)
Depending on your FPGA's BGA pitch, if you use round pads on the bottom you can fit 0402 decouplers between the pins. This allows more to be located where you'd prefer them. Good video. 👍
I must say, this video is excellent, you explain your process of thinking quite well, and throw in nuggets of information that is quite useful. Right on man, keep it up!
Short but very informative, well done Phil, thank you.
Thank you, Emin!
Last year I had to design my first ever board, and it was going to be populated with this exact FPGA. I was thrown in the deep end suffice it to say haha, wish this video existed then. Also unrelated but still related, your videos in general have helped and taught me so much since I found your channel last year! Keep doing the lords work man 👍
Will there be a video on the software side of things? It would be interesting to get an overview of the PCI-E driver and other software parts on the host side.
Yes, will be making videos on software/HDL side of things. Although that may be a while I'm afraid.
Superb Video, signed up for your new course. Thanks Phil, your a breath of fresh air 🙂
Thank you very much, Dean!
Finally I love this since there's so much you can do with this
i have been looking for this type of work, this so clear to understand, great work👍🏻
Amazing. This is way, way, way out of my league, but you made it interesting despite me not knowing what was going on most of the time. It blows my mind that people are this smart.
Thank you very much!
These are the videos that have to reach millions of views. I can't wait to get started with FPGAs. Still find them intimidating.
There's definitely quite a steep learning curve with FPGAs would very rewarding nonetheless!
Thanks a lot for your highly professional experience sharing. It is rare in TH-cam. For sure, Altium Academy rocks, but nice to see also user experience. As HW developer, I know how many discussions and best practice sharing could be in this field.
Interesting board and loads of useful information and tips as always!
The board reminds me of the Acorn CLE-215 which was intended for some crypto mining application but never took off. I think it had an Artix7 200T and were apparently available cheap on ebay a few years back although I've never managed to get my hands on one. People did some quite interesting things with them including running LiteX RiscV designs.
Kintex 7 325T! Also available from the original designer as a dev board.
Source: have both, they’ve been a great testbed but cooling is a nightmare.
Thank you so much for your exhaustive tutorials Phil
... Keep up the nice work you're doing for the TH-cam electronic community... To ♾️ and "so forth" 😅❤
Thank you very much, Muhammad!
in my opinion, you are the best...by far.. thanks for sharing Phil 😄
As always brilliant with tons of information. 😀
Thank you, Amaldev!
I was happy with my laptop, loved it. Single M.2 slot, all I needed. And then I saw this...
Now I need a newer laptop, with second M.2 slot.
You rotten swine, you (reference to classic radio comedy, The Goon Show)
This is amazing!!! Can't wait for your course
Thank you, Robby!
mPCIe also includes a USB2 connection on the card edge connector (And even has pins for SIM-cards to be used, in the case of cellular modems.). I'm not sure if they could be used simultaneously. So, if you plan on ever doing a re-revision of your PCB, you might be able to put a USB to JTAG bridge directly on your board for programming and debugging while the card is installed, without needing an external JTAG interface unless you're doing extremely high speed stuff.
That would be a nice solution but again you will be limited by the number of pcie lanes since mPCIe provide x1 lanes and this card is designed with x4 pcie lanes
Awesome! So now we need a design of embedded linux with PCIe m2 slot where we can plug it!
Pristine work, couldn't have done it better myself. That's what a proper hardware design should look like.
Thank you very much!
Woow excelent video! I was about to start studying for a developing a high speed board and this is great!
Thanks, Rafael :)
Future video suggestion... plugging in, powering up and using FPGA + PCIe board, drivers, software tool chains for programming the FPGA. Several use cases: ML use case, offloading compute, system monitoring of compute time reduced compared to no FPGA... board cost compared to other manufacturer equiv FPGA chip...
This looks like a very, very good layout. Great work!
The only place I would have made some extra effort is on the feedback of the DC/DC converter. As it's working at very high Fcy (>2MHz), feedback will be VERY sensitive to noise. A star connection to pin 24 "Analog Ground" can help reducing sensitivity to noise. Even more important when you're doing railway/military/automotive designs sitting in high EM fields environment.
Great video Phil. Brilliant mate.
Hey phil, how do you find this pin propagation delay for this fpga? Im designing a similar board and i try to check in the ibis model but i dont find it. Nice board btw!!
This is amazing! Really nice job.
Thank you!
Regarding the PCIe lanes, under a ps, did you take in account the internal FPGA delays for them to actually match?
This is crazy! Can you imagine using it for fpga gaming on a laptop?
Nice design! Did you create the schematic symbol of the artix 7 by yourself? Especially the decoupling networks are very clean.
I don't really like the power page, it's kind of unstructured.
Greets from a hw dev.
I just started your Mixed signal IC course, and I'd love an FPGA hardware design. The most I've done with FPGAs is HDL (Verliog/VHDL), but it would be awesome learn how they are designed as well!
Thanks for signing up to the course :) Hope the next course will address that!
Beautiful 👍
Yeah, this is plain fucking awesome. Thanks for the video
Thanks for watching!
Hi Phil, will you be covering the software stack for communicating with the FPGA from Linux or Windows? I think that's also a fairly important aspect of custom FPGA hardware accelerators in commodity laptops/PC's. Thanks.
Please let me know when the lecture starts. I really want to take it.
PCBWay do 60 layer boards! I didn't even think standard PCBs could have that many...
For a few minutes, I thought this is Phil's Computer Lab... and was wondering why the voice is a bit different, and is the FPGA going to be used for retro emulation acceleration or something....
Very Informative
Thanks, Mohsin!
Altium seems very capable .. I've been using Cadence for over 10 years and Mentor before that .. Now I've been playing with KiCad and EasyEDA but very limited support with hdi uVias
What's a real world use case where a 60 layer PCB would be used? The biggest I've ever seen was a small form factor dual socket motherboard with 16 layers and that seems crazy.
Amazing! Would it be possible to get the sources for this? Would be useful to use it unmodified for some purposes. If you want/need help, I can help with the Linux driver side, or even simpler testing with memory maps without the driver initially - I've previously worked with Xilinx Spartan 6 and Zynq, and Altera Stratix IV devices.
Phil ... I have been following your videos for a while. Decided to have a go with an STM32F411 Black Pill... the mistake I made was choosing an USB Audio endpoint as my first source.
It worked, except... that I2S PLL Clock setting becomes a real pain in the backside as the USB endpoint will happily send you perfect 48K but your I2S master clock is off by 0.5%. It means your buffers will over/under run and you will get DMA buffer colisons which sound like scifi sound effects.
I would love to see a video explaining how to do frame dup/drop mechanics to "reclock" a stream :)
I mean even if you get an I2S master clock which is exactly 48K, it will still drift around over time, so the problem can't be pushed out forever.
Hello!
PLEASE! Do more udemy courses on Udemy from Kicad.
I would like to learn how to make 4 layer pcbs
This is really cool, nice discussion and documentation of the PCB design, the electronics design community definitely lacks this. What kind of projects do you think you could use this for ?
This hardware screams out for an open source HDL design for partial reconfiguration of the 7-series FPGA over PCIe. Do you know of an example project that does that?
I've done this for the Artix 7 75T. It's referred to as Tandem with Field Updates. It's a very advanced FPGA design methodology, so I wouldn't recommend attempting unless youre familiar with FPGA development. There are example projects included with the PCIe IP in Vivado.
Excellent video, as are your others. How do you decide on whether to terminate DDR3 address lines or not? I've seen it done and not done (on reliable products), and conflicting information, so erred on the side of caution when I had a project on a tight timeline. This added cost for the Vtt rail and power dissipation so I would have liked to omit. Thanks.
I'm wondering why you didn't just go for a differential clock for your design than a single ended one?
Great video as allays.
1 How more precisely did you chose that buck IC + how did you size is vs the nominal and max current draw?
2 Why you didn't immediately go down in the inner layers with those PCIe signals?
3 Heat dissipation, i know FPGAs are power hungry so can that BGA pack dissipate enough ? Especially since it is going inside a laptop or PC (or maybe an RPI or a custom SBC) ? OR you considered a heat-sink before and it is not shown here?
4 For what project is this FGPA board? (if you can disclose it since it may be a company secret)
5 Regarding the course, maybe since we are getting into super advanced stuff and the part where it is hard to follow all the things for a personal hobby project, if it is for work i may need to do in the future probably since i love your teaching style.
6 Why did you need a custom stack up ? As in why the normal one for a 0.8mm 8 layer board was not proper ?
This may be a bit much so dont answer 7 if it is to personal : 7 How do you find companies that do so many interesting projects? And how do you get accepted in?
Because the CSG325 package XC7A35T chip is too expensive, after watching your video, I also started to use the FGG484 package chip to make the M.2 size board, please ask where can I download the source file of the PCB in the video, I want to refer to learn, thanks.
I wonder if I can do something like this with KiCad.
very interesting board. very professional(!)
Thanks, Andres!
When do you plan to release the Advanced PCB design course?
Does one of your courses show the process of making this board?
Have to learn a lot lot lot from you.
How did you set up the clocks in the MIG? Trying to do this myself and not sure what I should do about the system clock...
The next thing I would ask you if that was able to have that kind of setup could you just get a SSD based PCI Express board that has multiple spots for the ssds towards to put more than one of these processor accelerators onto it?
Love the DDR layout! Man though, if I could find some way to actually get my hands on FPGAs as a hobbiest that would be awesome, unfortunately I have to rely on work to buy me toys for now. Where did you source your A7?
Where did you find Artix-7 in stock? I paid $200+ a unit for xc7a15t-1csg324c
yeah good luck getting one with less than a year lead time. Digi-key says that the FPGA that Phil used, the XC7A35T-2FGG484I
will be in stock on 4 Jan 2024
LCSC has a number of Xilinx devices still in stock.
@@PhilsLab wow you are correct, seems crazy that Xilinx seems to place a higher priority on the Chinese market than its home country
@@davedoe6445 My company has a lot of this model in stock
How many iterations of that $1000 order did it take & how much hardware acceleration did it achieve?
Nice! Thank you for the share.
- How much time did you spend on such design?
- Could you share also some testing results on the EMI side?
What about via delay? Altium can't calculate it by itself, only the length.
I have a few questions:
1. Would it be possible to execute the FPGA's function through a function call in C/C++? Lets say there is a cryptographic algorithm that has been baked into the FPGA's function and you wanted to execute that algorithm via the HOST machine through C code. Is that possible?
2. Do you plan to make this a consumer product?
3. If yes, do you have an ETA on the development tools and the M.2 FPGA?
4. If yes, how much would it cost in USD/CAD?
[Edit]
I think i've found out that you have to use OpenCL to interface with FPGAs via C/C++.
Now the question is:
1. Can the same Xilinx OpenCL drivers be used with your implementation of the FPGA?
For me that just makes me ask one more crazier question since fpgas cost more than normal is it possible to make a variant with any Arm based processor?
Is that available as a product ? Good work, and generically useful. I imagine it is something that would sell well.
Is there a reason why you use Polygons over split powerplanes? They make the board view a lot less cluttered
How do you decide which and how many layers are ground or power?
I would be really interested in the fpga programming and the software on the host Pc side
When the course will be available?
Nice design and nice outcome. Why don't you use the transparency features in the 2D board view? It could help you a lot in seeing a lot of details.
Hello - for propagation delay - exporting values from Vivado are for example in this format
Min Trace Delay (ps) Max Trace Delay (ps)
A10 RSVDGND 27.853 28.133
A3 GNDADC 31.635 31.953
A4 VCCADC 30.131 30.434
A6 VREFP 27.116 27.389
A7 DXP 20.476 20.682
A8 M0_0 25.429 25.684
Would really want to understand how to use above min/max from Vivado in Altium
Thanks
IS there any place where I can purchase this. Am looking into FPGA accelerators for kubernetes clusters
is it something like LambdaConcept m.2 Screamer analog?
Dude your videos should be university courses
Thanks!
I'm very much a noob in electronics so pardon the dumb question: 7:00 isn't the pull-up resistor (R203) setting the PG1 to normally high already? so wouldn't it be permanently enabling EN2?
Very neat board, I was really looking forward to you featuring it in a video. Did PCBWAY complain about how the FPGA spans edge to edge with no clearance?
Also, it would be great if you show us a board with an HDI stackup. I would really like to see how you specify blind/buried vias and how you stagger them.
It's a pretty good layout. Do you have the results of EMC and SI simulations?
Hi Phil, should you provide the length matching only for data and CLK lines or for all interface signals including e.g. WE, CAS, CS...?
I typically match all signals within a group - overall, it isn't too much extra effort. However, you should be able to get away with not matching some signals as strictly (NCS and NRESET). Check out NXP's AN3940 for example or Xilinx 7 Series PCB Design Guide for more detail.
I wonder if it is possible to use for "emulators" for retro consoles like Mister.
will you publish this design as open source hardware? hope you are doing so as you have your repo link underneath your video description.
Is this thing beefy enough to do video encoding?
Is compatible with pcie mini to m2 adapters? I want to use it on a Samsung rv511
I'm not a dev of any sort, hardware or software, and I understand that this is an accelerator of sorts, but for what sorts of things would this be used for?
Now replace this A35T FPGA with A200T and we have a perfect rivals to NiteFury & ACORN 215..
Would this help regarding rendering 3D models and CAD files on a laptop that has Radeon built in graphics on a Ryzen 7 chip? Sadly my laptop is good at sketching since its a 2n1 with a stylus but it really chugs when it comes to rendering 3D models. I sometimes wish I would have gotten a laptop with Thunderbolt 4 support just for the external graphics card option but I have to play with the cards I'm dealt (or buy a new deck?)
Hello, Can I select pins from the same bank to be easiest route out?
Yes, if it also meets your FPGA/timing/.. constraints.