Hi

I am a student that wants to try out ORPSoC. I want to implement it on Actel, and was wondering about the ORSoC USB-JTAG debugger. Being a student, 99 Euro (before VAT and shipping) is a bit too expensive for me. I was wondering if any other alternatives exist? I have access to Flashpro3 programmer for instance, and maybe some more commercial debuggers at my university. Is there a more standard debugger that is also compatible with ORSoC? (It seems to be a IEEE standard, so surely there must be compatibility?)

If not, is there anyway I could build a debugger myself? I haven't seen any schematics or further detail about exactly how to ORSoC debugger is built.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Hi, Twar,

I am not familiar with Actel, but it looks like Flashpro3 uses JTAG for connection to board. I am using Altera and am using USBBlaster (analogue of Flashpro3) to debug the processor. So I have two simultaneously working programmers - one for FPGA configuration and one for processor program load and debug. To support debug I connected these two blocks to my SoC design (from OpenCores svn):

[/] [adv_debug_sys/] [trunk/] [Hardware/] [adv_dbg_if/] [rtl/] [verilog/] - Rev 69
[/] [adv_debug_sys/] [trunk/] [Hardware/] [jtag/] [tap/] [rtl/] [verilog/] [tap_top.v] - Rev 69

tap_top signals are assigned to pins that correspond to general purpose connector on the board so that programmer can be attached to it (as connector is not JTAG it demands some wires to connect).

On the PC site I am using adv_jtag_bridge and gdb to load program and debug.

This setup should work perfectly.

Although it is simple, I had some minor troubles to start working with it. And now I am still trying to solve some more of them. However, I can run and debug simple memory test or another toy program without any major limitations.

I hope it helped you in some way.

Olga

> I am a student that wants to try out ORPSoC. I want to implement it on Actel, and was
> wondering about the ORSoC USB-JTAG debugger. Being a student, 99 Euro (before VAT and
> shipping) is a bit too expensive for me. I was wondering if any other alternatives
> exist? I have access to Flashpro3 programmer for instance, and maybe some more
> commercial debuggers at my university. Is there a more standard debugger that is also
> compatible with ORSoC? (It seems to be a IEEE standard, so surely there must be
> compatibility?)

Hi Twar

We recently ran a weekend workshop on FPGA programming, where we brought up ORPSoC on a DE0-nano (http://chiphack.org/). All the sources for the workshop are on GitHub. We used a small JTAG to USB dongle, which I imagine you could also use to connect debug through. It's a standard FTDI chip.

DE0-nano costs around �70 and the JTAG dongle around �6. We actually have the dongles as a corporate giveaway, so if you email me your address, I'll put one in the post to you. If you get it working for debug, post it on the OpenRISC wiki, so others can learn from you.

HTH,

Jeremy

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