The Actel software device in the FeeServer CE

Overview

As described in Electronics for the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) the RCU has an Active Partial Reconfiguration (APR) network to reconfigure the Xilinx SRAM based FPGA in case there appear errors due to the radiation environment. This reconfiguration network includes some Flash memory and the Actel Flash based FPGA. The main task of the Actel software device is to monitor and control the operation of the Actel FPGA. For this reason it offers different services, as monitoring different registers that give information about the state of the hardware, to control the main operation modes of the Actel FPGA and to program the Flash memory for the Active Partial Reconfiguration solution to work.

The Actel FPGA features three ways to configure the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA:

Initial Configuration

Configures the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro once during startup or on command from the DCS board.

Scrubbing

Continously overwrites the configuration memory of the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, wether an error occured or not.

Frame by Frame readback and error correction

The Actel reads back the single configuration frame of the Xilinx Virtex and compares them to the configuration data stored in the Flash memory on the RCU.

For this Active Partial Reconfiguration solution to work, the Flash memory has to be programmed with the correct firmware for the Xilinx FPGA. There are two ways on how to program the Flash memory:

The rcuflashprog command line tool
the here described Actel software device

Information about the Actel FPGA and the rcuflashprog tool can be found at: Electronics for the Time Projection Chamber (TPC)#RCU Auxilliary FPGA Firmware for TPC and PHOS