Parallella Community

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

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

Hi Florent,

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

Cheers,

Andrew

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.

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