OR1200 & Altera

It has been a while since my last post. I came across some bugs in the Quartus II software that severely slowed down my progress. Some of that was my fault since I just couldn't let it go and spent hours trying to find a work around only to fail.

So in the end instead of having a parameterized traffic cop for the bus I ended up with coding every signal on the bus into the traffic cop. This means every time I add a new device on the bus I get to add more wires by hand which is not speedy and is error prone (Killed a few hours because I had a typo when I made it bigger). I suppose it is better that using Xilinx and not having SystemVerilog at all.

This is even more motivation to make my own HDL compiler which I am pushing forward as my Software Engineering Senior Project next year. I need to buckle down and write the idea proposal that is due next week.

The other bug in Quartus that is annoying me is array literal syntax for interfaces '{ interface_a, interface_b } is broken. Nothing gets wired, sorta. From what I could tell a few signals were half hooked up when I inspected using SignalTap. 2 wires got a value but the other end of those wires didn't. It was weird. I have sent these off to Altera and they acknowledged them after a bit of a hissy fit about me not using a supported linux distro (Even though, they could reproduce the problem themselves).

I've been working on the boot loader the last few days but it still has a few kinks in it I want to fix before pushing any changes. Not totally sure whats going on but it may be a problem with the traffic cop (though I hope not).