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 👍

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much - glad you approve! :)

@ShopperPlug

Жыл бұрын

Facts. Dude is a real computer engineer nerd, gotta admit it.

@frankearl9285

Жыл бұрын

@@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.

@cvspvr

10 ай бұрын

this guy fucks!

@thanatosor

5 күн бұрын

What was your Virtex 6 FPGA application?

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.

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!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much for watching! :)

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

3 ай бұрын

Difficult to make it cheap, especially small scale. That FPGA alone is a €100 part.

I’d be really interested in your implementation of the host-side pci driver. Will you be covering this on the channel?

@radoro

Жыл бұрын

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!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Yes, I'll do that once I've written and tested the implementation!

@charliegilliland6453

Жыл бұрын

@@PhilsLab Awesome, looking forward to it!

@tylerhayslett9073

Жыл бұрын

Xilinx provides some pretty well done drivers stock, and they work with their free IP cores!

@peterkurz7702

Жыл бұрын

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.

This is why we love your content.... where else on KZread do we have this indpeth look at PCIe interfaces and stuff! I'm never gonna build a pcb with one, but its seriously interesting to learn about all the same! This stuff, combined with your DSP theory with practical examples has just been a gold mine of 'intresting' content (for me, but for others, a seriously useful resource for future work!). Thank you!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much for your kind comment! Glad to hear that also the mix of different subject areas is of interest :)

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!

Hi Phil, I watched through every single of your video. You teased this board in a previous video and I searched for it almost everywhere but could find. Glad you published this video

This is probably the single most interesting / inspirational form factor / interface for FPGA dev - as you can slot it in to so many devices, from Windows laptops to RPi SBCs, etc, etc. I'd like to thank you for the video and add my voice to the comments below asking how you access the FPGA via software - the PCIe driver, etc.

Glad to see my M.2 footprint templates were useful. That is a really cool board you made there!

Dude, you are literally the best KZread channel I have ever seen, I wonder if Dave from EEVblog follow you, your audiences are pretty much the same, I'd think. Anyways, your videos helped me a lot getting into the design of electronics. Now I'm working with the development of instrumentation, sincerely a physicist.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much, Luiz! I've spoken to Dave before but not sure if he actively follows the channel. There definitely should be some audience overlap :) Glad to hear that the videos have been helping you get more into electronics!

Wow, this is incredibly impressive. Well done! I'm in awe.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Esra!

This is extremely helpful. Thanks! I will definitely be using your suggestions for my next project.

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.

i have been looking for this type of work, this so clear to understand, great work👍🏻

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.

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 👍

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 wish I had more time to watch all your content. Genuinely. Please don't stop.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much, Alexander!

Your evolution video after video is impressive, great job!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much, Thomas - hope it isn't downhill from here :D

@kmacademy6742

Жыл бұрын

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.

@4mb127

Жыл бұрын

@@kmacademy6742 "...and here's how we construct the phased array antennas and microwave emitters to construct a simple Starlink like design"

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

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

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.

Short but very informative, well done Phil, thank you.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, Emin!

“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

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

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

@TheElectronicDilettante

Жыл бұрын

@@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!

This is amazing!!! Can't wait for your course

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, Robby!

yes, congratulations! next a symmetric discombobulater! love the presentation!

1st King Philip's reality show :) I can't wait to see the course. Thanks for the great content. keep up great work!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Haha thanks, Mustafa!

Superb Video, signed up for your new course. Thanks Phil, your a breath of fresh air 🙂

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much, Dean!

Thanks a lot for your highly professional experience sharing. It is rare in KZread. 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.

Finally I love this since there's so much you can do with this

Niceee, this is what i’ve been waiting forr. Can’t wait to take the course.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, glad to hear that!

Very impressive project and board 👏 👏 👏

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, Nicola!

What a beautiful board!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, Jonathan!

@ahmedalshalchi

Жыл бұрын

Do you mean Phil's engineering work or made-in-China PCB work specifically ?!...

@Fusion12345

Жыл бұрын

Very neat components placement.

As always brilliant with tons of information. 😀

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, Amaldev!

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.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Yes, will be making videos on software/HDL side of things. Although that may be a while I'm afraid.

Great video Phil. Brilliant mate.

This is amazing! Really nice job.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you!

in my opinion, you are the best...by far.. thanks for sharing Phil 😄

Woow excelent video! I was about to start studying for a developing a high speed board and this is great!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Rafael :)

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.

Superb tutorial!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, Michal!

Hey Phil, awesome video again. Can I ask how you program this device/interface with PC? Would love to see a video of what exactly this device is intended to do in the PC environment.

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 ?

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.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much!

What a pleasure we are! 🥂

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.

@c1m1w

Жыл бұрын

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.

60 layers 'Mental' indeed ! scary looking stuff...Cheers.

Thank you so much for your exhaustive tutorials Phil ... Keep up the nice work you're doing for the KZread electronic community... To ♾️ and "so forth" 😅❤

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much, Muhammad!

These are the videos that have to reach millions of views. I can't wait to get started with FPGAs. Still find them intimidating.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

There's definitely quite a steep learning curve with FPGAs would very rewarding nonetheless!

That's awesome. Now to figure out the PCIe IP block and drivers

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Exactly :(

Awesome! So now we need a design of embedded linux with PCIe m2 slot where we can plug it!

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.

Very nice! I remember wanting to do something like this as well, but then I've decided to not risk it and got a dev kit from Terasic\Intel Instead. I've got a few questions - 1. Is it possible to simulate the board before sending it to production? Is it possible to verify that the pcie is in spec and do some kind of assertions with the custom chips (fpga in this case) to check if the important \ non-configurable lines are okay? 2. What about heat? I mean, it's a nice form factor and all, but is it possible to know how much heat that thing is going to produce before finding out that your PC is melting from the inside? 3. How fast can you go? I mean, what are the limitations of using a service like PCBWay when it comes to fast hardware implementation such as this (pcie, ddr memory)? will there be a bottleneck if, hypothetically, I'll come across a really fast FPGA chip that would usually be bundled with really fast memory such as DDR5 and have the parts matched using a service such as this, or is there a 'sweet spot' I should stick to when it comes to making my own design? I don't really know what makes a pcb good for high speed computing, no idea how to get the settings right when ordering or how to tell if a supplier isn't capable of delivering the right quality of the board I need. 4. Will you touch the programming part? I'd love to see you configure something like this, so it's able to 'talk' with other parts of the system - like getting it to output using the network card for debugging \ data instead of running physical wires, assuming it's going to be used inside some kind of a computer - lots of built in outputs and not much space for actual wires.

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.

Regarding the PCIe lanes, under a ps, did you take in account the internal FPGA delays for them to actually match?

I wonder about benchmarks with and without hardware accelerator, drivers, and device manager. This is awesome.

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!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for signing up to the course :) Hope the next course will address that!

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.

@Brucebina

Жыл бұрын

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

Very nice... for the power supply what was your gain and phase margin for the stability analysis? Just curious

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?

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...?

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

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.

Hey Phil, thanks for the great walk-thru. I played around a bit with the NVMe form factor a bit, and it was super hard to fine the gold finger information & outline. Where did you find the dimensions and outline for the NVMe gold fingers? Thanks!

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Mina. I got the dimensions from the KiCad/EAGLE M2 Git repo I mentioned in the video. Trying to get any more info proved to be more difficult unfortunately..

Hi there, huge fan of your content. I do have a question however. Did you already test the DDR3 interface? I am designing my first board with a DDR3 memory and a 7-series FPGA, and am a bit skeptical about omitting the termination resistors, which I technically can, given I am also only using one DDR memory chip.

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?

Very cool board! I was looking for something exactly like this for prototyping and playing around and found nothing about a year ago. $1k is a bit more than I'm comfortable with to just play around. Have you considered a kickstarter? What would the price be in quantity of say 50 or say 200?

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Nicolae! I need to double-check what the board would run at higher quantities - however, I can't source any more of the Artix FPGAs :( A Kickstarter would have to wait until this chip shortage has blown over I'm afraid, but I'd love to do one at some point.

Very usefull information. Thank you! How do you check electromagnetic compatibility? Is there ways to simulate this in Altium?

Very Informative

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Mohsin!

Have to learn a lot lot lot from you.

Beautiful 👍

Assume you'll have to write firmware and drivers for this, can you make videos on that topic too?

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Yes, I'm planning to do that for FPGA and SoCs.

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.

very interesting board. very professional(!)

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Andres!

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...

It's a pretty good layout. Do you have the results of EMC and SI simulations?

Hello Phil! Is it possible to have a power-on sequence as follows? VCCINT -> VCCBRAM -> VCCAUX -> VCCO -> VMGTAVCC -> VMGTAVTT I couldn't find a proper answer in datasheets and forums.

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!!

Thanks for the video, very informative! Is it possible to download the project files for this lesson somewhere?

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?

PCBWay do 60 layer boards! I didn't even think standard PCBs could have that many...

Is there a reason why you use Polygons over split powerplanes? They make the board view a lot less cluttered

Can you show how you’d use this in a program? It’s very interesting but I have no idea how to put some hardware acceleration processing on that

@jaykickliter

Жыл бұрын

It would be very niche, and it’s pretty difficult to balance offload perf improvements with added IO latency. I wonder if this was a more of an exercise than something with a concrete use in mind?

This is crazy! Can you imagine using it for fpga gaming on a laptop?

Thanks for this amazing video. Although I usually stay away from Xilinx FPGAs, I might try to design along using an STM32MP157. By the way, when you order these boards, isn't it a customs nightmare to import? I'm asking because so far I had to keep everything below 150EUR to have a quick and un-problematic shipping.

@sanjikaneki6226

Жыл бұрын

good point i am very curious too since china imports entering EU are sometimes problematic

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for watching! Regarding import - you can either use DDP shipping (if offered) where you prepay charges. Or just pay customs when it arrives in your country - if you have set up a business it makes it a bit easier with VAT/EORI numbers.

Yeah, this is plain fucking awesome. Thanks for the video

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for watching!

will you publish this design as open source hardware? hope you are doing so as you have your repo link underneath your video description.

Pristine work, couldn't have done it better myself. That's what a proper hardware design should look like.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much!

Do you know if there's a way to set up an Altium DRC rule for requiring reference vias within a certain distance of a via in a particular net class? Is the DRC query language smart enough to be able to also check if the signal via's layer range (in blind/buried boards) is a subset of the reference via's layer range? e.g. a via from 1:2 shouldn't be considered a valid reference via for a signal via from 3:6.

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

I'm pretty sure all of that is possible with custom 'DRC queries' in Altium. You can build pretty complex rules using the builder/helper.

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...

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?

Nice board! Do you have any info available about its PC driver and usage?

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Pedro - working on the HDL/firmware sides at the moment and will make some videos on that in the future.

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....

Any specific application you have in mind for this board? It would be cool to see some firmware for hardware acceleration. The board itself is really well engineered

@PhilsLab

Жыл бұрын

Thanks! I made this predominantly for myself to play around with some basic PCIe implementations and also for the course. If you have any cool ideas, would definitely welcome them :)

@RealNovgorod

Жыл бұрын

@@PhilsLab Crypto mining, of course! :) The usual DSP stuff (FFT/convolution etc.) would be interesting as well, though the question is whether it can really outperform a modern CPU given the communication overhead. How does it compare to a low-end GPU in the same price range other than potentially being more general purpose?

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.

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.

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.

Please let me know when the lecture starts. I really want to take it.

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?

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?

@edfurmanski2714

Жыл бұрын

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.

I would be really interested in the fpga programming and the software on the host Pc side