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A Bit of Hindsight: Part 1: Signal Routing

A project log for Backbone Bus

Backbone is my proposal for an off-chip, Wishbone-inspired backplane interconnect that supports multiple bus masters.

samuel-a-falvo-iiSamuel A. Falvo II 05/31/2016 at 17:110 Comments

For my needs, it doesn't really matter how I lay out the address or data bus pins. When I synthesize a design to an FPGA, the signals can be routed to arbitrary pins through the UCF or PCF files. I was relying on this when I came up with the pin layout for the DIN connectors.

However, in retrospect, it was probably a mistake to put all data pins on row A, and all address pins on row C. Based on my experience routing the bus on the backplane, it would have been better to keep all the related signals together on the FPGA (minimizes internal routing resources), and interleave the data and address pins across rows A and C. So, instead of:

    Row A    Row C
1    D0        A0    |    pins assigned along the row.
2    D1        A1    |
3    D2        A2    |
4    D3        A3    V

I should have done this instead:

    Row A    Row C
1    D0        D1    --->  Pins assigned across rows.
2    D2        D3
3    A0        A1
4    A2        A3

Electrically, they're identical; it's just that it makes routing buses to relevant pins on FPGAs easier, particularly if the FPGA is in a TQFP or similar package.

For BGA devices, I don't think it matters as much; breaking signals out of a 16x16 BGA (such as with an iCE40HX8K-CT256 device) is going to require no less than a 4-layer board and quite possibly more, just to route signals a few centimeters in any coherent direction and in any reasonable order. And, it's going to involve a lot of vias. A lot of vias.

The one nice thing about the layout of Backbone's pinout now is that it makes interfacing to microcontrollers-as-slaves that much easier. For example, perhaps I'll replace the KIA circuit in the FPGA with a KIA-like interface in a microcontroller, which acts as a USB-keyboard-in, standard-bytecode-out KIA-like replacement. Such a device is much easier to implement using a microcontroller than using FPGA resources. (Sounds like a job for the S16X4A again!)

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