Marvell NFC timings on CN9130

[Chris Packham]

On 17/05/23 14:22, Chris Packham wrote:
>
> On 17/05/23 05:25, Miquel Raynal wrote:
>> Hi Chris!
>>
>> Chris.Packham at alliedtelesis.co.nz wrote on Tue, 16 May 2023 04:46:38
>> +0000:
>>
>>> Hi Miquel, Thomas,
>>>
>>> A hardware colleague reported a concern to me about a new design we 
>>> have
>>> using the Marvell CN9130 SoC (which I think was called Armada-8K before
>>> they rebranded).
>>>
>>> Basically their concern is that the tWC timing they observe is faster
>>> (~18ns) than the documented minimum in the hardware datasheet for the
>>> CN9130 (25ns). Aside from not meeting the datasheet spec we've not
>>> observed any other issue (yet).
>> I would have expected the controller to support almost any kind of
>> timings, including SDR EDO mode 5. tWC is 25ns with mode 4, but 20 on
>> mode 5 (ONFI). So I believe you're running a system with a chip that is
>> not compatible with the fastest mode. If that is the case, it may
>> explain why you don't see errors with this chip: it may support
>> slightly faster timings than it advertises.
>>
>> Anyway, if your findings are true, it means the current implementation
>> is slightly out of spec and the timing calculation might require to be
>> tweaked a little bit to reduce tWC.
>>
>>> I notice in the marvell_nand.c driver that marvell_nfc_init() sets the
>>> NAND Clock Frequency Select bit (0xF2440700:0) to 1 which runs 
>>> according
>>> to the datasheet the NAND flash at 400MHz . But the calculations in
>>> marvell_nfc_setup_interface() use the value from
>>> clk_get_rate(nfc->core_clk) which is still 250MHz so I'm wondering if
>>> maybe the fact that the NAND flash is being run faster is having an
>>> impact on timings that are calculated around the core_clk frequency.
>> What if you reset this bit? Do you observe different timings? I hope
>> you do, otherwise this is a dead-end.
> Yes if we clear the bit the timings go from ~18ns to about 30ns.
>> The timings are derived from this clock but I remember seeing different
>> rates than the ones I expected with no obvious explanation (see the "*
>> 2" in the calculation of period_ns and the comment right below). So
>> maybe this is due to the 400MHz vs. 250MHz issue you are reporting, or
>> there is an undocumented pre-scaler in-between (this is my original
>> guess).
>
> I wondered if the * 2 was because of this or because of the comment 
> that the ECC_CLK is 2*NF_CLK. That probably also means that a number 
> of SoCs are running with an extra *2 that don't need to be (e.g. 
> Armada-385).
Interestingly cp110-system-controller.c is aware of the 400MHz option 
but that's only effective if it's been set prior to the kernel booting. 
I'm not really familiar with clk drivers but I assume it must be 
possible to make it look up the frequency dynamically instead of using a 
single fixed value.
>
>>> Do you think that the timings calculations should take the NAND Clock
>>> Frequency Select setting into account?
>> There is not much about this clock in the manual, so if the clock is
>> feeding the logic of the controller generating the signals on the bus,
>> then yes. You can verify this with the test mentioned above.
>>
>> Could you check the values set to tWP and tWH with and without the bit
>> and probe the signals in both cases? Maybe the "* 2" in the
>> period_ns calculation will vanish if we use 400MHz as input clock rather
>> than clk_get_rate() (or better, expose the bit as a mux-clock and use
>> it to tell the CCF the right frequency) and you'll get a sharper tWC in
>> the end, which hopefully should match the spec this time.
>
> I was going to have a look to see if I can get the NAND clock to 
> correctly reflect the value when the NAND Clock Frequency Select bit 
> is set. In the meantime I'll also do some experiments removing the * 2 
> and hard-coding the frequency at 400MHz.