Annotator Pro

This wiki provides design details and development notes regarding the Annotator Pro.

Power Requirements

Please use only the power supply and power cable provided with the board. Rev 1 boards have a wiring error that requires reverse polarity on the power supply connection. This is fixed on Rev 2 boards. Also, please be certain to program the FPGA first, before installing new I/O modules onto the baseboard. The I/O on the module connectors is all programmable, so we will need to be careful to not install a module into a slot programmed for something else.

Boot Options

The Annotator Pro can boot Linux from

1. On-board flash
2. mSATA drive connected to P5 on the board
3. SATA drive connected to P4 on the board. If you connect a SATA drive to P4, you should also power the drive from P29, SATA Power.

Configuration

1. Ublox GPS Chipset

FPGA-CPU Interface

The Annotator Pro provides three independent interfaces between the on-board FPGA (Altera Cyclone IV) and the on-board CPU (PLX NAS7825):

1. GPIO: Several GPIOs on the CPU are routed to programmable I/O on the FPGA.
2. Static Memory Interface (SMI): This provides a 20-bit address bus and and 8-bit bi-directional data bus.
3. PCIe Interface: This provides both programmed I/O and DMA capability. The NAS7825 has 2 PCIe ports (PCIeA and PCIeB). On the Annotator Pro, PCIeA is connected to connector P27 on the board (which will accept a standard mini-PCIe card), and PCIeB is connected to the FPGA. Each PCIe port has a 1MB address space for control/status registers, and a 1GB data space. The FPGA PCIe link is tied to PCIe Slot B on the NAS7825.

The CPU also provides an SPI port that is used to program the FPGA configuration device.

FPGA (Cyclone IV)

Design Overview

ADC Inputs

PCIe Memory Map

RS422 I/O

Anneth Embedded

annethembedded.html

Linux SDK

Prepare Dev System

Build Boot Image

Change MAC Address

Boot the kernel from a dev PC

Performance

DMA (FPGA to DDR Memory)

Ethernet

SATA RAID