Has my genesys 2 board died?

[johnribe]

I have had a program loaded in the micro sd flash for several months and it has been working.  Yesterday it quit working so it seems like it may be a genesys problem.  Do you repair these or do I have to just buy another?  I have had the board for approx 18 months.

John Ribe

[zygot]

1 hour ago, johnribe said:

Yesterday it quit working so it seems like it may be a genesys problem.

I don't follow your analysis but then again you haven't provided much information.

• what doesn't work
• does it complete configuration?
• can you configure the Kintex device form JTAG with the same "program"?
• can you configure the Kintex with a "golden" application that let's you confirm basic board operation like LEDs, buttons, switches etc?
• have you verified that the contents of the SD card is what you expect?
• have you checked the configuration mode settings?

Power supply issues might cause a failure to configure and start up.

[johnribe]

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply.  I have been working on this for 2 days and if I tried to recount everything I have done it would turn into a dissertation, so I am interested to know what questions other people ask.   Are there any other ways to verify what has been loaded, I don't think there is a program that will extract the fpga programmed data and compare it to the .bit file is there?; that would be handy....

what doesn't work - Outputs not toggling.  1 piece of the program just echoes the state of the 8 switches to the 8 LEDs on the board and that is not even working.  I just created a separate design that does nothing except echo the switches to the LEDs and that loads and works.  The echo part of the non functioning program just uses verilog "assign" statements to do the echo (there is also clocked switch debounce routine, maybe I will try a non clocked version).

does it complete configuration?  Yes the the "Done" led comes on at the end.  But the Xilinx hardware interface

can you configure the Kintex device form JTAG with the same "program"?  I configure over the usb jtag port and get the same results.  I do not have a jtag jtag connection and althought the genesys board has holes for one it has not been populated by digilent.

can you configure the Kintex with a "golden" application that let's you confirm basic board operation like LEDs, buttons, switches etc?  Yes, I set the board to run the digilent "out of box" demo and it works fine.

have you verified that the contents of the SD card is what you expect?  Yes but I have not done a binary file compare, I will try that next.

have you checked the configuration mode settings?  They have not been changed in 18 months.

Power supply issues might cause a failure to configure and start up.

[zygot]

@johnribe

If you can configure the FPGA with something that appear to work and interact with hardware then at least you know that the FPGA is good and the IO Bank that connects to that hardware is good. You might check the other Vcco IO Bank voltages but I doubt that there's a problem there.

You can certainly read the contents of SD memory cards using a USB adapter. You could also try creating another sd card though I don't know the details on how to do that.

If you are in a pinch for time you should contact Digilent Sales directly and ask about repairs but I'm pretty sure that the answer will be no. I had a KC705 that configured properly but never got passed startup to do anything. I never could figure out the problem. Xilinx support was no help. The company that builds and tests the boards for them wants almost as much to "see if they can fix it" as the board costs new. I don't think that's your problem.

I suggest reading the configuration reference manual from Xilinx to familiarize yourself with how that process works. That will help trying to figure out what may be wrong. I'd try and configure the FPGA with the same bitstream as in the flash if that's possible.

At the moment I don't have any other ideas....