Browsing by Author "Thorne, Nicholas James"

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    Firmware and gateway for the ACE1 reconfigurable accelerator card
    (2011) Thorne, Nicholas James
    This thesis describes the continued work on the in-house designed FPGA based co-processor daughtercard referred to as ACE1. The aim: to create an ecosystem incorporating firmware, bootstrapping code, drivers and a development environment to create a seamless environment. Challenges in setting up and debugging the interface that connects the coprocessor daughtercard to the host server include: problems with the power network, the edge connectors and timing problems with the primary protocol which prevented host-based communications. The options include allowing the daughtercard to function in a stand-alone fashion and we present a gateware solution that allows users to select from a number of alternatives for each of the layers in the Open Systems Interconnect networking model.