[Lancelot] VGA clk

Marco marco at fpga.nl
Sat Feb 5 02:02:13 PST 2005


Hi Mark,

This was one of my comments when I saw the Stratix Nios board schematics.
The SDRAM and both expansion boards must run at the same frequency, while
the Stratix device has some many PLLs. Unfortunately the board layout had
already finished, but  Altera used my recommendation for the Cyclone board;
the SDRAM is feed by another PLL than the expansion boards. 

To solve your problem you can 'over clock' the video DAC. Like hpa says the
maximum frequency of the video DAC is 80 MHz. Feed the SDRAM and Lancelot
board with the 50 MHz clock and connect the internal Lancelot video clock to
25 Mhz. Now the video DAC clocks in double pixels, but the video controller
is still responsible video timing, so effectively you get an 640 x 480
picture.      

Yesterday I posted a new version of the Lancelot controller. It supports the
(undocumented) Avalon lock signal, which forces the memory to be locked to
Lancelot while new video data is fetched. This solves the issue when Nios
and Lancelot are using the same memory and Lancelot can't read a new video
line on time. You can download the Lancelot reference design at my website
(http://www.fpga.nl) 

Best Regards,

Marco
www.FPGA.nl 

-----Original Message-----
From: lancelot-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:lancelot-bounces at zytor.com] On
Behalf Of Wei Mark Fang
Sent: zaterdag 5 februari 2005 0:55
To: H. Peter Anvin; Tommy Thorn
Cc: lancelot at zytor.com
Subject: Re: [Lancelot] VGA clk

I'm asking about the VGA clk because I am working on a design (on the
Stratix Professional Board) that utilizes the on-board SDRAM and the
Lancelot DAC I attached on. Currently, the design is configured at 50Mhz.
The SDRAM (U57) must be at the same frequency as the core, so I drive it
using a pll. 

I need the SDRAM at the core frequency of 50Mhz, but since I want 640x480
resolution, I have to get a 25Mhz clk signal to the DAC. However, since the
DAC and the SDRAM use the same clock buffer (U2, ie. PIN_E15), this is
impossible to do. The problem is that it seems I can only distribute a
single clock to various parts of the board (external units). 

The only solution I see right now is to lower the core frequency to 25Mhz,
to match the required frequency of DAC for generating 640x480 resolution.
But this is not what I want to do. Do you see other solutions?

Thanks for your insights.

-Mark

 --- "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> wrote: 
> Tommy Thorn wrote:
> > 
> > Well, 25MHz maps nicely to 680x480 VESA mode.  I
> don't know of any modes using
> > 50MHz.   Finially, is the DAC even rated that
> high?  Why do you care?  You can
> > just use the DCM to devide it down.
> > 
> 
> If I remember right, the DAC is rated at 80 MHz, which is enough for 
> 1024x768.
> 
> Ultimately the clock frequency you need is a result of the resolution 
> you want.
> 
> 	-hpa
> 
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