Intel® Arria® 10 Hard Processor System Technical Reference Manual

ID 683711
Date 8/28/2023
Public
Document Table of Contents

A.7.2.1. Handling an FPGA Configuration Failure after Early I/O Release

If an FPGA configuration failure occurs after early I/O release, the HPS shared I/O and hard memory controller I/O enter input tri-state mode. In this situation, any accesses to peripherals or memory interfacing these I/O fails. HPS dedicated I/O are not affected by FPGA configuration failures.

If you are using early I/O release and issuing an HPS-initiated FPGA configuration afterward, you must ensure that your software routine includes a way to avoid FPGA configuration failure or a recovery mechanism that does not rely on the HPS shared I/O or hard memory controller I/O.

You must implement one of the following solutions in software.

  • To prevent FPGA configuration failure, load the FPGA core configuration file into SDRAM and perform an FPGA integrity check before initiating configuration. For example, you can run a custom integrity check, such as a CRC, on the .rbf file to validate that there are no errors in the file. Intel also recommends that you enable ECC capabilities to avoid bit-stream corruption issues.
  • To recover from an FPGA configuration failure, execute the HPS-initiated configuration from on-chip RAM. If the HPS is executing entirely from on-chip RAM, you can recover your application by reconfiguring the peripheral .rbf file to reenable the HPS shared I/O and hard memory controller I/O. After these I/O are recovered, your application can either attempt to configure the same FPGA image that caused the original failure or use a fallback core .rbf file to prevent the same failure from occurring repeatedly.

Note: If you are using full FPGA configuration, you do not need to make any of the adjustments listed above. For full FPGA configuration, the .rbf file contains both the core and peripheral configuration and your application can only access the HPS I/O after the device is successfully configured.