This project provides a simple SDRAM controller and a means for verifying its compatibility with a given FPGA development board.

All that’s required to use this project is an FPGA with at least 32kbits of block RAM, about 1,600 logic elements and a 16-bit wide SDR SDRAM chip of not more than 512 megabits in size. (Larger sizes could be accommodated but would require changing the firmware linkscript and CPU parameters.) Also required is either an RS232 port, or a single spare GPIO header and a USB-to-TTL-RS232 adapter, and terminal software on a PC to read the ZPU program’s output.

Theory of Operation

The firmware runs entirely from Block RAM, leaving the SDRAM clear for testing. The tests performed are as follows:

• First stage sanity check: Writes 0x00000000, 0x55555555, 0xaaaaaaaa and 0xffffffff in turn to location 0 then reads them back and makes sure the data matched.
• Byte check: Writes longwords 0x55555555 and 0xaaaaaaaa to locations 0 and 12 then writes bytes 0xcc and 0x33 to locations 0 and 15, respectively. Reads back the longwords and checks that they now read as 0xcc555555 and 0x55555533, respectively.
• Address check: Writes a pattern to various locations in the SDRAM, then overwrites just the first one with a different pattern. It then checks that the new pattern hasn’t propagated to any of the other locations, which will happen if the SDRAM is smaller than expected, being incorrectly addressed by the SDRAM controller, or has a bad connection on an address line. As a bonus, if everything’s working correctly this test detects the SDRAM chip’s size.
• LFSR check: Uses a simple random number generator to generate a series of addresses and values. It writes a couple of hundred thousand such, then resets the random number generator and does a read pass, checking for errors.

The Firmware is compiled using minimal startup code which omits the instruction emulation code. Therefore the ZPU must be instantiated with optional instructions enabled.