by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 11 October 2020

In the part 4 of the Odyssey with the Startix V board from the eBay, I explore the QSFP+ port and establish a 40 Gigabit Ethernet connection to a computer with an Intel X710 40GbE network adapter.

HW overview

Since this board was designed to run in a datacenter, the …

Stratix V accelerator card from eBay, part 3

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 06 September 2020

As mentioned in my previous blog post, the next step would be to get the JTAG running in Quaruts. In this blog post I describe how I managed to develop a library as an interface between the FPGA board and Quartus, and demonstrate the developed interface to download the bitstream …

Stratix V accelerator card from eBay, part 2

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 07 June 2020

In my previous blog post I have explored the FPGA card I have purchased on eBay, and in this post I will present an adapter card which I have developed. The adapter provides PCI Express connection between a normal card-edge slot and the FPGA card, as well as the access …

Stratix V accelerator card from eBay

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 03 May 2020

A couple of weeks ago @rombik_su in a Twitter thread pointed out a very cheap FPGA accelerator card on eBay. The board contains a proprietary Samtec board-to-board connector, most likely carrying power, PCI Express, and auxiliary signals (JTAG, IPMI to BMC, ...), two QSFP cages, DDR3 and a large FPGA, hidden …

Books read: Synchrotron Radiation Sources

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sat 02 November 2019

Category: Books,

Here are my notes on the book "Synchrotron Radiation Sources: A Primer", edited by H. Winick. Although a little bit dated (the book is from 1995) it gives a nice overview of all components of a modern synchrotron and helps with better understanding of how all subsystem interconnect together. It …

New Ubuntu, old problems with ModelSim

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sat 20 April 2019

Category: FPGA, ModelSim,

A couple of days ago a new release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo was released. On my personal laptop I follow the non-LTS line, which brings me cool features and updated programs (e.g. Python 3.7, GCC 8.3, ...) out-of-the-box.

Unfortunately, because the libraries are updated, the …

Notes from FOSDEM 2019

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 03 February 2019

Category: Quantum computers, Open Hardware, Chisel,

I attended FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels:

Brussels

and these are my notes from Quantum Computers, CAD and Open Hardware and Python tracks:

Quantum Computing

Delivering Practical Quantum Computing on the D-Wave System

Intro

marketing slide for D-Wave Leap
practical = Adiabatic Quantum computer
Riggeti uses gate model instead
physical impl: 3 m …

Chisel tester with overridden step() method

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sun 14 October 2018

Category: FPGA, Scala, BFM,

Introduction

Chisel is a modern take on Hardware Description Languages, such as (System)Verilog and VHDL. Both Verilog and VHDL were conceived in 80s, and are currently still the main two options when it comes to describing hardware. From the Developer Experience point-of-view, I would say that both languages are …

Blog restart

by Jan Marjanovic
on Sat 15 September 2018

This blog was left dormant for quite some time now. From the last blog post in February 2017 a lot has happened. I have moved to Hamburg, Germany, to start a new position as FPGA Developer at MicroTCA Technology Lab at DESY.

This is me in European XFEL tunnel:

Jan in European XFEL tunnel

There …

FOSDEM 2017

by Jan Marjanovic
on Fri 03 February 2017

Category: Conference,

I am writing this post from Brussels where I am attending FOSDEM 2017 conference.

There are a lot of interesting talks, and sometimes it is quite hard to decide on which one to go. Luckily there the talks are recorded and one can later check also the missed ones.

Here …