Some BeagleV's Overheat and Won't Link Train DDR

BeagleV
1

I have been using 12 BeagleV-Fire boards for some time and have noticed that 3 out of the 12 boards seem to have issues with overheating and will not boot out of HHS once they are warmed up due to failing to link train ddr past 80%.

The only way to get these boards to boot is to either disconnect from power and let them cool down, or put a fan next to the boards. If a fan is constantly blowing the boards boot fine, but if you remove the fan and try to power cycle or issue a reset from HSS, the DDR will fail at 80% again and hang.

I thought it might have been just me breaking the boards, so I bought a brand new one off mouser, plugged it in, programmed it, and immediately got this issue of the board overheating and failing to link train.

I’ve also noticed that the boards that overheat also have a lot of issues writing to the emmc. USBImager will fail about 50% of the time, saying that write verify failed.

Has anyone else noticed this issue or know of a fix? The polarfire SoC on the board shouldn’t require active cooling to function.

2

Hello and welcome!

You’re not alone. I can’t run my BVF w/o active cooling or it will eventually fail to boot.

Haven’t seen it center on the DDR, but the eMMC is playing tricks with me…

eMMC support (#1) · Issues · BeagleV-Fire / beaglev-fire · GitLab

@Vauban’s latest comment gives me hope that a Software workaround is in the works.

Always good to get a larger sample-size, even if it doesn’t help your immediate problem.

3

Ok thanks for the link! It sounds like I have the same problem you do.

I don’t think it was actually the DDR failing since the board works and is happy once its running. If it was the DDR i’d expect to see our code crashing in realtime.

The HSS must be crashing trying to load the image out of the emmc.

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Did you update the gateware? The DDR trainig settings were updated after some of the board were manufactured.

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Hi Vauban,

Thanks for the info, I went and compared my DDR settings in the MSS configurator and noticed the DDR controller parameters I was using did not match the newest settings in the beaglefire repo. Once I updated those settings the link training issue went away.

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