Connection Epiphany with ARM

Any technical questions about the Epiphany chip and Parallella HW Platform.

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Connection Epiphany with ARM

Postby jimmystone » Tue Dec 22, 2015 7:45 am

Hi, All

Is there any other way connect epiphany chips with other ARM chip?
I want to use a faster ARM instead of ZYNQ
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Re: Connection Epiphany with ARM

Postby piotr5 » Wed Dec 23, 2015 8:03 am

I'm no hardware guy. but as far as I understood epiphany uses for communication a special protocol which only other epiphany chips understand. the details for that protocol are open, and implemented on fpga. if you desire another arm, it either needs something alike to fpga (i.e. zynq) or you need to [*]create[*] a chip that translates between whatever communication protocol the arm talks in and the epiphany eLink protocol. everything you need to create such a chip is available, you merely need to invest lots of money for the creation of such a thing.

additionally, if you look at the other postings here, it seems epiphany chips are not for sale since there exists no factory capable of creating those chips. again the description how to do that is freely available online, so if you desire you can create your own epiphany chips, maybe even with built in communication-unit for arm -- if you use the open hardware license. naturally this approach will require a lot more research and thereby a lot more money, since unlike the specs for how epiphany functions, there are no free online ressources telling you how to create a microchip because those are company-secret of the fabbers regardless if such fabbers actually exist (as I said, for epiphany the fabbers don't exist anymore, they have been upgraded in a way that isn't fully backwards compatible)...

of course my limited understanding of hardware means I could have misunderstood something. this is merely my own point of view. I'm no authority at all.
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Re: Connection Epiphany with ARM

Postby sebraa » Tue Jan 12, 2016 3:15 pm

The eLink interface is currently available in two versions:
- hardware implementation on the Epiphany chips
- IP implementation for FPGAs.

If you want to interface an Epiphany chip to anything, you need to provide an eLink interface to talk to. If your target ARM does not contain some programmable logic, you will probably need to use an FPGA as a bridge chip (interface converter). The eLink interface is not provided natively by any ARM chip on the market.
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