VCK190 Evaluation Board

In this post we’re going to build and run our new multi-port 25G Ethernet reference design for Versal boards and the Opsero Quad SFP28 FMC. The design is based on the AMD Xilinx 10G/25G Ethernet Subsystem IP. Specifically, we’re going to boot PetaLinux on the VEK280 and establish a 25G Ethernet connection between it and a 25G network adapter that is installed in a Ubuntu PC. We’re doing this on Versal board VEK280 which is one of the few AMD FPGA-containing devices that can support 25G Ethernet at the time of writing. The instructions can also be applied to Versal boards VCK190, VMK180 and VPK120; there is a reference design for all of these boards in the Github repo.

Important

This workaround is applicable to the VCK190, VMK180 and VPK120 because they all use the same circuitry for generating the VADJ voltage: an IR38164 buck regulator with the same I2C address (0x1E), connecting to the same port of the same I2C switch (address 0x74, port 0) and connecting to the same I2C pins of the Versal device (PMC MIO46/47).

Note that this workaround is NOT applicable to the VEK280 because that board applies a fixed VADJ voltage of 1.5VDC.

High-capacity non-volatile storage is pretty handy in the intensive computing applications that the Versal ACAP adaptive SoCs get employed in. NVMe SSDs are a perfect way to provide that storage because they can directly interface with the Versal’s integrated blocks for PCIe. Those integrated blocks are Gen4 compliant which makes for an extremely high bandwidth connection between the FPGA fabric and the storage medium.

Over the past couple of weeks, my team and I have been bringing up an NVMe SSD on the Versal AI Core VCK190 Evaluation kit using the FPGA Drive FMC Gen4 adapter. We’ve built a new reference design from our work and shared it on Github. In this post we’ll look at how you can build and run the example design, and then we’ll partition and write a file to one of the SSDs. For those who are trying to do this from scratch using the QDMA Subsystem for PCIe IP, Vivado and PetaLinux, the last half of this post will be about the things that we found to be important in getting everything working correctly.