Triputer

TRIPUTER

I bought in September 2016 an FPGA development board called Cyclone V GX Starter Kit from Terasic (see Figure 1). It costs 179 US$ and uses a 28-nm FPGA with six 3.125 Gbps transceiver channels from Altera. The board offers a 32-bit wide LPDDR2 DRAM memory with 512 Mbytes capacity. This device has a very high bandwidth for many applications. In addition the board has a HDMI output, an audio device, an SD card interface, many LEDs and switches and some expansion connectors.

The plan is to realize with this board a "multiple computer" system. The name TRIPUTER is an indication of how many systems will be integrated. The first one will be the PC532 running NetBSD. The second one will be the Ceres-3 using Oberon. Currently the last one will be the BBC computer with the 32016 Second Processor.

Using a commercial board for this purpose is the best choice. Nevertheless the board is not ideal. For example it lacks an Ethernet port and a real time clock. But it is cheap and the used FPGA is a modern one which will be available for many years. The missing features can be added through the expansion connectors. I will develop the necessary hardware for it too.

The three computers to be integrated are very different from a software point of view. Having them available in one system should be an exciting experience. The FPGA of the board is big enough to hold the required hardware.

Fig. 1. The initial configuration of the Cyclone V GX Starter Kit is presenting a photo of itself on the screen

Of course such a complex system is not build over night. But as time goes by the fourth milestone is now achieved :-)

Fig. 2. TRIPUTER V0.2 has calculated a Mandelbrot image. M32632 made it 20 times faster than NS32532/NS32381.

Fig. 3. The hardwired VT100 terminal of TRIPUTER V0.3 shows the boot process of NetBSD.

Milestone 4 : TRIPUTER V0.3 is available => updated to V0.33 again due to some issues in the VT100 terminal emulation.

Description: version 0.33 of TRIPUTER contains the PC632M system running NetBSD with an SD card. Still this system uses the USB connection for the RS232 interface. The image for the SD card is available atSoftware/NetBSD. TheV0.33 zip archive contains the following files:

• TRIPUTER_V033.sof , the FPGA configuration
• TRIPUTER_V033.pof , the flash configuration
• TRIPUTER_V033.pdf , the User Manual
• output_file.cof , the definition file for Quartus to generate a new pof file
• ans32k.exe , the Series 32000 crossassembler for Windows
• monitor.32K , the source code of the TRIPUTER MONITOR program
• mon_auto.hex , the hex file of the monitor program for PC532
• two application programs and a readme.txt

The date of the zip-file is 11 May 2019.

Status: done.

October 2019 : the PERI board is available!

The PERI board is an IO board which brings to the FPGA board some necessary extensions: a true RS232 interface, a real time clock (RTC), two PS2 ports for mouse and keyboard, a second SD card connector and a 100 Mbit Ethernet interface. All of these things are now operational. One port is not yet usable: SATA. The hardware is there, but the verilog code for this challenging interface must still be written.

Figure 4 shows the PERI board in action.

Fig. 4. The PERI board with the serial number 1 is attached to the Cyclone V GX Starter Kit. 2 of the 3 LEDs of the Ethernet interface are active.

The purpose of PERI is to transform the Starter Kit into a standalone computer. Then all the planned systems can be implemented.

To test the functions of the PERI board I have made a new version of TRIPUTER: it is V0.9 . TheV0.9 zip archive contains only three files:

• TRIPUTER_V09.pof , the flash configuration
• TRIPUTER_V09.pdf , the User Manual
• monitor.32K , the source code of the TRIPUTER MONITOR program

The system can only test PERI if the flash is being configured with the pof file. Then some software is available. I hope that V0.9 will be replaced soon with a version which enables SATA...

Milestone 5 : TRIPUTER V1.0 is available.

Description: TRIPUTER V1.0 will be the first system that uses all features of the PERI board. It will emulate the PC532, run NetBSD from a SATA device and will have an Ethernet interface for easy down- and uploading of big files.

Status: to be done.

Milestone 6 : TRIPUTER V2.0 is available.

Description: TRIPUTER V2.0 will contain the Ceres-3 and the PC532.

Status: to be done.

This chapter was last modified on 4 December 2019. Next chapter:M32632/TITAN6