Mips Technologies Malta - Wiring It up; Power-Up Sequence

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Getting Started

12 MIPS® Malta™ User’s Manual, Revision 01.07

2.3 Wiring It Up

Begin by connecting the Core Board to the Malta motherboard. Notice that the connectors J3 and J4 have the same

numbers on both boards, and one of the corner mounting pillars is offset to prevent incorrect insertion. When remov-

ing the Core Board at some later date, be careful not to bend it. Under each corner of the Core Board is a mounting

pillar, with a gap where a screwdriver can be inserted to gently lever it up. Only apply the screwdriver to the PCB

area around the mounting holes to avoid accidently cutting any tracks.

Before turning on the power, you will probably want to have set up the following:

• tty0. The supplied PROM monitor (YAMON) by default prints its welcome message via the tty0 port (J6), using

38.4 kbaud, 8 bits/char, RTS/CTS hardware handshaking, without parity. A 5-wire cable is sufﬁcient. The imple-

mented signals must be RXD, TXD, RTS, CTS, and GND. See Section 5.7, "Serial Ports" for the serial connector

pinout.

• Ethernet. Twisted-pair ethernet cable will plug into the socket on the rear edge of the board. This will auto con-

ﬁgure at 10 or 100Mbit/s, half/full-duplex.

• Check that the settings of S5 switches are correct, as speciﬁed in Section 4.2, "Switches".

2.4 Power-up Sequence

When you connect the power supply and switch it on, the board is powered up. Check that the green “ATX ON”,

“3V3”, “5V”, and “STBY” LEDs are on, indicating good power.

NOTE: With some ATX supplies, Malta draws so little current that the supply is not stable. This is technically a

deviation from the ATX spec.

NOTE: The board is brought into “stand-by” mode by pressing the switch marked “ON/NMI” (S4) for more than

four seconds. The “ATX ON” LED is lit when in “stand-by” mode. Press “ON/NMI” to bring up the board again.

The green “FPGA” LED should be on, indicating that the board’s FPGA has booted.

The red “RST” LED should be off. If it is lit, it indicates that something is holding the board in reset.

When the CPU initially boots, YAMON signs-on using the tty0 serial port (the left one) with information about the

board’s conﬁguration, for example, board revision, SDRAM size, etc.

You should now arrive at YAMON’s prompt line. Simultaneously, you should see the word “YAMON” on the ASCII

LED display. If you do not see this, check the YAMON User’s Manual for the meaning of the displayed messages.

Yamon’s help command lists the available commands, and help <command name> gives more detailed infor-

mation about a speciﬁc command.

The board’s default mode is little endian. You can change to big-endian using S5-2, as described in Table 4.3.