Hi Paul, The toolflow remains the same, you just get more FPGA / QDR / IO -- in principle you just change the platform from ROACH to ROACH2, recompile, and you're good to go. In practice, there's usually a few tweaks you'd need to make depending what on-board resources you have used. Eg.
Gpio / QDR / 10GbE blocks will need their parameters changing to match the roach2, note that ROACH2 has a different width QDR interface, and needs a software calibration script to run on programming to make the QDR link work. If you're using a rare-ish ADC, you might find that the yellow block doesn't exist for ROACH2 -- it's usually easy to port these, and most have been done already. You can always compile your design for ROACH2 before you get the hardware and discover any potential pitfalls. Personally, I would say, if you're expanding an existing ROACH1-based instrument, just buy some more R1s (maybe someone on the maillist can get you some second hand ones on the cheap). If you're just increasing your stock of lab equipment and might have more demanding tasks on the horizon (the ability to use SFP+ 10GbE links is a big win), perhaps you should go for ROACH2, but it's not going to be *too* long before ROACH3's are around, and SNAP is coming up to being production-ready. Cheers, Jack On Fri, 23 Oct 2015 at 23:52 Paul Davis <pmda...@ualberta.ca> wrote: > We currently have a few Roach1's but we need to get more. Is there any > reason to change to the Roach 2? The Roach1 already does everything we > need so we don't need the increased capabilities. Does the toolflow change > at all? From what I can see I just need to recompile with a new device. Is > this true? >
