CRU Weekly Meeting

Wednesday 24 Aug 2016, 10:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

CERN

CRU Weekly meeting (17 Aug 2016)

Present: Sanjoy, Shuaib, PiPPo, mazsi, alex joins at the end

Secretary: Erno(7), PiPPo(5), Shuaib(1), mazsi(3)

Actions:

• (all) review minutes & questions from CRU EDR:
  https://indico.cern.ch/event/512890/attachments/1291308/1954023/20160620CRUEDR.pdf
• (PiPPo): send back the Altera Arria 10GX devkit we had on loan

Report on Actions:

1. 10G PON

• in contact with altera about the 2UI bitslip issue, should answer them more timely (a simplified design they can play with is to be created).
• added avalon interconnect to various TTCPON blocks.
• will modify to do as much control through xcvr/pll register interface as possible instead of custom control signals (e.g. enabling serial loopback, resets, etc).

2. GBT

• No news (Erno is on vacation, sometimes working remotely).

3. DCS

• No news.

4. PCIe

• card now works in gen3 x8 mode (it was in a wrong slot).
• seen performance ~6.7 GByte/s (that's good :).
• link training is not stable: card sometimes does not come up after reboot. sanjoy did some tweaks on analog settings for ES2, maybe that helps here, too. full power cycling always helps.
• firmware stability issue: sometimes it's hard to get it started; but once started it's very stable. looking at it.
• error injection capability will be added.
• todo: export register address space to the rest of the design (e.g. avalon MM master; 256 MByte = 28 address bits, 32 bit access need; maybe via a 2nd BAR).

5. Integration

• still working with erno's GBT project. register access needs rework (avalon interconnect to be added?) probably needs restructuring.
• clock domain crossing between TTCPON and GBT: very long compilation times when constrained properly. will probably start with FIFO (= not fixed latency).

AOB

• Sanjoy to CERN: 4 september or 11 september - should come as soon as possible, to have as much overlap with PiPPo as possible. even if Arria10 card is not available.
• we will have only one A10 board at CERN now (attila card from sophie) - might be a problem.
• prototype FW release is scheduled for end of september - that's in ~5 weeks.

Vacations

• Erno's leave extended until 29 august.
• Pascal at CERN school next week.
• PiPPo at CERN in september, on conference 10-14 october, on leave until 7 november (but can work remotely).
• mazsi working from budapest 7, 12-13 september, on leave 8-9 september.