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authorPavel V. Shatov (Meister) <meisterpaul1@yandex.ru>2020-01-23 13:25:02 +0300
committerPavel V. Shatov (Meister) <meisterpaul1@yandex.ru>2020-01-23 13:44:56 +0300
commit175bbe0e5b3d109dc0c6174bafb6a38de0342c69 (patch)
tree4b8f6b6f8c442e1fdd54006814ed252529587b5a /config/core_config.py
parentf7652ba7ffbce578a7b53df7e29402e5163ad7ac (diff)
Added reset replicator module. Details below.
Due to security reasons, we must use async reset for sensitive parts of the design. In short, if the system clock is stopped, which is definitely an abnormal situation, sync reset won't let us to wipe secret information and a potential attacker can then try to steal it. Async reset is generally discouraged in an FPGA, since it's very often a highway to failed timing, but we use it knowingly. Now another catch is that our convention is to use active-low reset signal polarity, since we might go for an ASIC in the future and that's what you would use there. The problem is that currently we use an FPGA, where most of the primitives have active-high reset ports. ISE will throw in an invertor LUT during synthesis and then route all the reset signals from this LUT. What you get is a "root" invertor LUT, that effectively resets an entire design. No wonder global placement takes hours. Moreover, this extra LUT doesn't allow easy replication of the reset signal. This special replicator module manually instantiates as many invertor LUTs as necessary inside of a generate loop. Luckily, manually instantiated CLB primitives aren't optimized away during synthesis (thanks, Xilinx, seriously). Those invertor LUTs are then followed by asynchronous active-low localized reset generators, that also can't be optimized away.
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