Connect sliceKit to xCORE-200 Multichannel Audio

[myndideal]

Hi,

I would like to discuss, or even get a review of my designed small adapter board. The concept is simply: get a board with connectors, which is completely the reverse of the official XA-SK-XTAG2 board, and it can be connected between two boards. In example: Square (j8 on XP-SKC-L2) connector of the master board, and XSYS on xCORE-200 MC Audio board as a slave board.

Before I send it to a pcb mfg, I would like to take a look again, and of course get some feedback regarding of my mistakes, or any further ideas... The main goal, to have possibility to create an xn file and project for a system which have (in my scenario) two XP-SKC-L2 boards and one MC audio board connected. On this adapter board the JTAG, XLink will be used by default, debug uart and the rest of the pins will be routed to a pin. Because the square connector has 2x8 other pins too, I decided to use CMOD/PMOD kind of pinout. These are completely optional connectors here.

Problem, without an adapter board: Because of the official XP-SKC-L2 board's JTAG output nets (in case of two boards are daizy chained) has no fan outs on pins, I am not able to connect the MC Audio board to there in obvious way (ie with jumper wires). So the only position is the slice connector where jtag nets can be found.

Please see the attached pictures.
Thanks!

[myndideal]

KiCad desgin and xc source are here: https://github.com/bfarago/xmos_uconn1_slice

[matthew1]

Hi,

the L2 sliceKit is based on XS1 and the MC Audio board on xCORE-200. The tools don't support this kind of mixed network. You could take a look at the new xCORE-200 sliceKit:

https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?product=35833

Regards,

Matthew.

[myndideal]

Hi Matthew,
Thank you for the answer.
This is the error message, when I specify the xn file with two different kind of architectures:
Error: XN11085 Switch architectures cannot be mixed.

Is it a detailed description about this issue somewhere?
Is it a hw related limitation of the xlink protocol itself, or this is a toolchain imperfection to not yet compile codes for this scenario ?

[larry]

Tools always produce an executable for one architecture, XS1 or XS2 (xCORE-200). There is no way to write a single program that has some tasks running on an XS1 node and some on an XS2 node.

Error XN11085 will be one of the indications of no support for mixed architecture

I am not aware of any documentation dealing specifically with the issue of multi-architecture support

But the link protocol is compatible, so if you had an XS1 application and an XS2 application, each as a standalone executable, they could communicate at runtime.

Links are normally set up statically, at boot time, with the help of the development tools. Again, no tools support for mixed architecture networks of interconnected nodes. But it is possible to also set up links dynamically, at runtime. I would suggest application note AN01024 as a starting point. I also found an old project posted by a forum user that is relevant, and might help.

https://www.xmos.com/support/appnotes/AN01024
http://old.xcore.com/node/977/revisions/1351/view