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PCI Express Arria II GX

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I am attempting to get the PCI Express interface working with the Arria II GX but I cannot seem to program the device. After switching the correct dip switch and and plugged it into a windows XP box in a PCI Express x16 slot, I got the following error: 

 

CONF_DONE pin failed to go high in device 1 

 

I am not sure what this means or what I should do to fix this problem. Would the type of PCI Express slot matter? Only the light for the PCI Express x4 slot lights up on the Arria II GX development board. I am using the reference design found on the altera site for PCI Express. From looking up this error it gives the following solutions: 

 

 

  • Communications cables not securely connected 

  • Incorrect device selected 

  • No power to target system 

  • Device nCE pin not connected to GND 

 

 

All the cables and connections seems perfectly fine. I have been searching for information about the nCE pin but I have had no luck so far.  

 

Any help would be much appreciated. 

 

Thank you.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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The CONF_DONE fail happens most likely targeting to wrong device. 

or could be power issue. 

 

There are two flavors of A2GX boards, 

125 and 260. Are you choosing right one? 

 

There is a a2gx PCIe example on the wiki, so you might want to give it a try to see if the device is really working or not as well as PCIe is working or not. 

http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/pci_express_in_qsys_example_designs
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Thank you for your response. The CONF_DONE error occurred because I moved the pin over to add the PCI Express to the JTAG chain. This did not need to be done. Now I have the Arria II GX (125 variety) dev board programmed correctly. 

 

Does anyone know of a good way to confirm that everything is working with the PCI Express design? My goal is to bench mark latencies from reading data off of the board to user space memory and back to the board. I can't seem to see the PCI express design working on the board yet using signal tap or be able to read and write registers correctly. Anyone have any ideas of how to make sure the design is working or do the memory benchmarking? I tried using the program and reference design combination mentioned in the above post but all the data transfers fail but I can read all the system registers.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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--- Quote Start ---  

Does anyone know of a good way to confirm that everything is working with the PCI Express design? My goal is to bench mark latencies from reading data off of the board to user space memory and back to the board. 

--- Quote End ---  

 

 

I would like to do the same testing and verification, have you managed to do it?
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