Removing ~2 ns from the fabric MISO path (EXI_J4 merge + the CS mux) did NOT
move the hardware result: the GC still returned a byte-identical 0B 80 at
27 MHz while reading correctly at 16 MHz and below. Identical rather than
intermittent means the path is well outside the window, not marginally inside
it, so trimming fabric delay further was not going to get there.
MISO is source-synchronous -- driven on the falling edge, sampled by the GC on
the next rising edge -- so the whole path must fit a HALF period, 18.5 ns at
27 MHz, minus global-buffer insertion, pad, connector and the GC's setup.
Driving from fabric spent 8.4-11.5 ns of that on routing alone.
An SB_IO output register sits in the IO tile: clock-to-pad is the IO flop's
own delay with no fabric routing. nextpnr confirms the path left the fabric
entirely -- miso_io.D_OUT_0 packs at die (9,0), the pad itself, SB_IO count is
unchanged at 24, and no negedge -> <async> path is reported any more. What
replaces it is a setup path INTO the IOB register (10.07 ns against a
half-period), which is internal and has nothing stacked on top of it.
PIN_TYPE was decoded from yosys's own SB_IO model rather than from memory,
because wrong bits there produce a silently dead or mistimed output:
[5:4]=10 tri-state, combinational OUTPUT_ENABLE
[3]=0,[2]=1 dout = dout_q_0, single-rate REGISTERED output
[1:0]=01 simple input (unused)
NEG_TRIGGER=1 moves the IO registers to the FALLING edge.
To keep simulation and silicon agreeing about MISO, the slave exposes
miso_next -- the value the shift register WILL hold after the falling edge --
and spi_mode3_slave T6 proves it predicts spi_miso bit for bit. Without that
the IOB register would be an untested sim/hardware divergence, which is the
exact class of bug that has cost this design the most time.
BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: MISO is now TRI-STATED when CS is high, held high by the
pad's PULLUP, instead of actively driven high. EXI MISO is a SHARED bus --
SP1 is on channel 0 alongside memory-card slot A -- so driving it while
deselected was wrong and could fight a card.
--seeds 8: clk 28.5-30.7 MHz, EXI 41.6-49.7 MHz, 8/8 PASS. The EXI numbers
fall (62 -> 49) because the posedge->negedge setup path into the IOB register
is now charged to that domain at a half-period constraint; 41.6 MHz worst case
is still 1.5x the 27 MHz target. Best seed 3 (clk 30.68, EXI 49.14), flashed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Remaining after the bit-phase fix was a SPEED-DEPENDENT failure -- the GC read
correctly at 1/2/4/8/16 MHz and failed only at index 5 (27 MHz), returning
0B 80 = 0x17 late by exactly ONE bit. Opposite signature to the phase slip it
was hiding under, and this one really is propagation delay.
MISO is source-synchronous: driven on the falling edge, sampled by the GC on
the next rising edge, so the whole path must fit a HALF period -- 18.5 ns at
27 MHz -- minus global-buffer insertion, pad, connector and the GC's setup.
The failing build measured ~10.5 ns of that internally. Critical path:
clk-to-q 1.39 tx_shift (3,12)
routing 3.60 tx_shift[7] (3,12) -> (5,5) to the CS mux
logic 1.21 Mux(cs_n, 1, ...) LUT
routing 4.79 miso (5,5) -> (17,0) to the J4 MISO pad
10.99 ns (2.60 logic, 8.39 routing)
Two removals, both of things that were pure cost here:
1. EXI_J4 is GONE entirely (exi_j4.py, the resource, the AND merge, the docs
section, scripts/pi-exi-wirecheck.py) -- recoverable from git history. The
AND put a LUT in the CLOCK path, denying the EXI clock pad its dedicated
global-buffer route, and MISO fanned out to the J4 pad at die (17,0) which
was the far end of the critical output path: 4.79 ns of routing to a header
with nothing plugged into it. 10.2-11.5 ns -> 9.3-9.6 ns.
2. The Mux(cs_n, 1, ...) LUT is gone from the MISO data path. It only parked
MISO high when deselected, which the flop's own reset value does for free:
tx_shift now has init=0xFF and CS is that domain's async reset, so MISO is
tx_shift[7] with nothing in between. Removes 1.21 ns of logic plus the
3.60 ns route feeding it and lets the placer sit the flop by the pad.
synth.py now PARSES AND RANKS BY the MISO clock-to-pad delay. Ranking by fmax
was how a board that failed at 27 MHz passed every seed at >=1.29x margin --
fmax was never the binding constraint for this design.
--seeds 8: clk 28.7-32.5 MHz, EXI 49.6-62.1 MHz, MISO 8.38-10.22 ns, 8/8 PASS.
Best seed 8 (clk 30.35, EXI 49.56, MISO 8.38 ns), flashed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The bit engine had TWO independent phase references: rx_bit counting rising
edges and tx_bit counting falling edges. Those only stay in step while the
host emits exactly as many falls as rises, and it does not -- a transfer that
begins on a RISING edge (CS asserted while CLK is already low, or the clock
gating between two back-to-back host transfers) delivers a rise with no
matching fall. tx_bit then slips one bit and never recovers.
RX never notices, because the rising count always equals the host's bit count.
So the header decodes perfectly, the right register is selected, and ONLY MISO
is wrong -- which is what made this look like an output-edge or output-delay
problem for two rounds of debugging.
Measured on a GameCube: every MISO byte shifted right by 2 bits, identically
at every EXI speed index. NWAYS read 05 C0 (= 0x17 with two leading zero
bits), device ID 01 00 80 80, speed sweep ok=[0,0,0,0,0,0].
Two diagnoses were wrong before this one, and both were ruled out by evidence
rather than argument:
- NOT propagation delay. Index 0 is 1 MHz, a 1000 ns bit time; no output
path fails there. Speed-independence is the tell.
- NOT the output edge. The old rising-edge build and the new falling-edge
build returned BYTE-IDENTICAL 05 C0. Flipping the edge would have moved
it; it did not, so the slip is upstream of the output stage.
What settled it was a measurement. PHASE_METER=1 builds a diagnostic,
non-functional bitstream whose engine transmits a constant 0x80 per byte
instead of the FIFO head, taking the register file and both byte FIFOs out of
the MISO path so the host reads the engine's byte PHASE directly: 0x80
aligned, 0x40 one bit late, 0x20 two bits late. Hardware read 0x20 in all
eight slots, localising the fault to the bit engine in a single run.
Fix: the shift register loads on rx_bit == 0. One phase reference, on the
edge the host counts, so the two cannot drift.
Regression test (spi_mode3_slave T5) asserts CS while CLK is LOW so the
transaction begins on a rising edge. The old counter fails it by exactly one
bit: A5 3C comes back as 52 9E. EVERY earlier testbench asserted CS with CLK
high, so falls and rises always matched and the slip was structurally
invisible -- the same blind spot as the Mode 2/3 mix-up, which was invisible
to a master that parked MOSI early. Vary the starting edge in SPI tests.
Timing after the fix, EXI_J4=1, --seeds 8: clk 26.9-31.1 MHz, EXI 45.8-61.7
MHz, 8/8 PASS. Best seed 4 (clk 31.07, EXI 56.70), flashed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Replaces the PLL-fed 54 MHz `capture` domain, which oversampled the GC's
27 MHz EXI clock 2x and so put BIT-level timing across a CDC boundary: the
engine's view of the clock lagged the pin by 2 FFSynchronizer stages plus a
register (~55 ns) against a 37 ns bit time, so MISO came out ~2 bits late and
the GC read 0x17 as 05 C0. No amount of oversampling fixes that -- 54 MHz
gives only 2 ticks per bit and the part cannot close the 81 MHz that 3x needs.
The engine is now clocked by the pin itself (pin 44 = global buffer input net
6, no board change), making MISO clock-to-Q. ExiCapture creates four domains:
exiclk (posedge, samples MOSI), exiclk_n (negedge, drives MISO), both
async-reset by CS, plus reset-less exififo_w/exififo_r for the byte FIFO sides
-- reset-less because resetting one side of an AsyncFIFO desynchronises its
gray pointers, and posedge because AsyncFIFO has a posedge-only reset CDC
internally and cannot host a negedge side.
Also removes the SPRAM response FIFO. The DMA read was one byte late because
the round trip did not fit the protocol's turnaround byte; the arbiter already
exposed valid/ready, so the FIFO bought a cycle of latency and nothing else.
The response is handled outside the FSM (the reply lands in RHDR_PAD, not
SPRAM_STREAM) with a one-entry hold for when tx_fifo is momentarily full.
The PLL was left instantiated but unused after the rewrite; removing it frees
the hard macro and pin 35 (which stays unconnected only because the board is
already built that way). This is what lifted the pass rate:
domain target before after
clk (sync) 24 MHz 28.1-30.2 26.4-32.2 8/8
capture_clk 54 MHz 2 of 8 PASS (gone)
EXI pin domain 27 MHz -- 45.6-64.4 8/8
Best seed 3: clk 32.18 MHz, EXI 55.86 MHz. The binding constraint has FLIPPED
-- `clk` (1.10-1.34x) is now tighter than the EXI domain (1.69-2.39x) -- so
synth.py ranks seeds by worst RELATIVE margin, not by the EXI number.
synth.py could not have scored this design at all: it required the vanished
capture_clk, and its regex '(\w+)' cannot match nextpnr's exi_clk_$glb_clk
(no $ in \w). add_clock_constraint was also landing on the wrong net -- under
EXI_J4 the clock is the AND of two pads, not either pad -- so nextpnr silently
fell back to a 12 MHz default and under-optimised the whole EXI domain.
Testbenches:
- spi_mode3_slave had lost its testbench entirely in the rewrite. Restored
with a strict Mode 3 master (changes MOSI on the falling edge, samples MISO
in the clock-low phase) and MUTATION-TESTED: flipping either clock edge in
the RTL makes it fail. Both of those bugs previously reached silicon
against a lax master that parked MOSI well before the edge.
- exi_j4 T2/T3 returned [0,4,2,2]. Real bug: the engine latches the FIFO head
at each byte boundary, so a 2-byte command header leaves only ONE drain
slot. DEVID streamed zeros until CS and left two stale bytes -- one too
many -- so the NEXT enumeration came back a slot late. DEVID now pushes
exactly four bytes and stops. Register-space reads may still over-push:
their 4-byte header gives three drain slots.
- Dead ports removed from SPIMode3Slave (hdr_bytes, frame_start, cs_active,
byte_idx) and the mode2 parameter is gone -- there is one correct edge
convention and it is now enforced by tests.
All 14 module suites pass, plus bba_top at EXI_HALF=1/2/8.
CLAUDE.md: rewrote the clocking, CDC inventory and module tables; marked the
2026-09-30 capture_clk measurements historical; and corrected the line in
"Critical Protocol Notes" that still stated the INVERTED edge convention
("MOSI sampled on falling, MISO driven on rising" is Mode 2) -- the original
implementation followed that doc error.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lets a bench host drive EXI without the SP1 edge connector, for bring-up.
Merges a second set of EXI pads onto the existing ones rather than repinning,
so the SP1 connector stays live and the default build is untouched. The three
inputs are AND-merged, which is correct because every EXI input is inactive
HIGH (CPOL=1 clk, active-low cs_n, mosi only matters while cs_n is low): the
unplugged side idles at 1 through its SB_IO PULLUP and passes the other side
through, so no select signal is needed. Outputs drive both pads.
All five J4 pads are on the same bottom die edge as the EXI pads (x=13..18 vs
x=5..9), so the capture domain keeps its anchor. It still adds 3 LUTs ahead of
the input synchronisers, so EXI_J4 builds must sweep seeds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An interactive UART command shell drives a UDP send/receive test on the
W5100's socket 3, running ALONGSIDE the live BBA (socket-0 MACRAW) with
EXI keeping bus priority. MACRAW+UDP coexistence is W5100S-datasheet
confirmed (S4.6 + "4 independent SOCKETs"). Now the default flash build
(--console selects the old event-log console).
New / changed gateware:
- uart_shell.py (new): rebbarb> shell over FT2232H channel B. Commands:
help; udp unicast <ip> [msg]; udp broadcast [msg]. After each send it
waits (bounded, else "timeout") for a reply and prints "rx <payload>".
Line buffer + message ROM live in block RAM with a sequential parser
(LC-efficient); 1-deep RX holding reg keeps pastes intact. 8 sim tests.
- w5100_parallel_master.py: configurable UDP socket (default 3) with UDP
send AND receive (IP-stack init, runtime dest IP, WIZnet UDP RX header
+ payload). Gated by enable_udp_test so the MACRAW path is unchanged
when off. Tests U1-U4 + MACRAW T1-T5.
- exi_capture.py: CAPTURE-DOMAIN CRITICAL-PATH FIX. The TX byte-FIFO
read-enable was gated by its own gray-coded ready
(r_en = ... | (flushing & r_rdy)), forming a consume_ptr -> gray ->
r_rdy -> flush -> r_en -> consume_ptr loop that capped capture_clk.
Replaced the r_rdy-based "drain until empty" flush with a fixed-length
drain counter (FIFO is only tx_depth deep), removing the pointer
feedback from r_en. Path 24.3 -> 19.6 ns; flush behavior preserved.
- bba_top.py: wire shell <-> W5100 UDP (send + rx); shell additive.
- synth.py: shell default build; env-var UDP network config; documents a
reverted PNR-timing-priority experiment.
Timing (--seeds 8, default shell build, 67% LC): capture closes on 4/8
seeds (best seed 4 = 58.36 MHz, +8%), clk passes on all. This is BETTER
than the pre-shell 2/8 baseline because the flush fix improved the
capture domain intrinsically. Flash build/seed4/top.bin.
Bring-up caveats (unchanged): W5100 socket register addresses / UDP
header format are datasheet-derived (confirm on hardware); UDP_SRC_IP /
subnet / gateway must match the LAN for unicast ARP.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Roflin
Dennis Brentjes