LiteSATA.

[9600]

Wondering if this could be used to implement SATA:

https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litesata

I see that Zynq Linux drivers is on the list of possible improvements, so it sounds promising.

Perhaps someone better qualified to do so could comment?

Cheers,

Andrew

[florent]

Hello Andrew,

unfortunately you won't be able to use it on the actual Parallella since it requires at least a transceiver.
It's a shame that Zynq with transceivers are so expensive which was probably not compatible with the targeted Parallella price.

I have others cores I want to port to the Parallela I bought but haven't found time yet to play with it...

Cheers,

Florent

[9600]

Hi Florent,

Thanks for the clarification and I look forward to hearing about your porting efforts in due course

Cheers,

Andrew

[FHuettig]

Interesting core! Transceivers capable of Sata-2 can be had in a Spartan-6 LXT starting around $50 in low qty. The litesata project says they only support 7-series GTX transceivers, but it might not be too hard to port that logic to GTP. It would then be possible to build a board with the Spartan-6 and SATA connector, that interfaced to the Parallella via GPIO connector.

About 6 years ago I interfaced a TI DSP to SATA using a SiliconImage PCI-SATA bridge, but it looks like those parts are all PCIe now, no surprise, so that doesn't help. Marvell has a PATA-SATA bridge, it would be possible to create a PATA interface using the GPIOs and use a chip like that.

[florent]

Hello Fhuettig,

yes porting to a Spartan 6 FPGA should not be that hard. (It was maybe not clear but I'm the author of the core). I've tried to have a good separation between what is specific to a target and what is generic.

By the way we have moved LiteSATA to MiSoC https://github.com/m-labs/misoc.

I'm not able to design a such board, but in case someone want to do that, I can help for the SATA and FPGA gateware (we also have a nice collection of others cores).

Florent