[U-Boot] [PATCH] ARM: mx6: ddr: Add write leveling correction code

[Stefano Babic]

On 30/03/2018 03:04, Marek Vasut wrote:
> When the DDR calibration is enabled, a situation may happen that it
> will fail on a few select boards out of a whole production lot. In
> particular, after the first write leveling stage, the MPWLDECTRLx
> registers will contain a value 0x1nn , for nn usually being 0x7f or
> slightly lower.
> 
> What this means is that the HW write leveling detected that the DQS
> rising edge on one or more bundles arrives slightly _after_ CLK and
> therefore when the DDR DRAM samples CLK on the DQS rising edge, the
> CLK signal is already high (cfr. AN4467 rev2 Figure 7 on page 18).
> 
> The HW write leveling then ends up adding almost an entire cycle (thus
> the 0x17f) to the DQS delay, which indeed aligns it, but also triggers
> subsequent calibration failure in DQS gating due to this massive offset.
> 
> There are two observations here:
> - If the MPWLDECTRLx value is corrected from 0x17f to 0x0 , then the
>   DQS gating passes, the entire calibration passes as well and the
>   DRAM is perfectly stable even under massive load.
> - When using the NXP DRAM calibrator for iMX6/7, the value 0x17f or so
>   in MPWLDECTRx register is not there, but it is replaced by 0x0 as one
>   would expect.
> 
> Someone from NXP finally explains why, quoting [1]:
> 
>     "
>     Having said all that, the DDR Stress Test does something that we
>     do not advertise to the users. The Stress Test iself looks at the
>     values of the MPWLDECTRL0/1 fields before reporting results, and
>     if it sees any filed with a value greater than 200/256 delay
>     (reported as half-cycle = 0x1 and ABS_OFFSET > 0x48), the DDR
>     Stress test will reset the Write Leveling delay for this lane
>     to 0x000 and not report it in the log.
> 
>     The reason that the DDR Stress test does this is because a delay
>     of more than 78% a clock cycle means that the DQS edge is arriving
>     within the JEDEC tolerence of 25% of the clock edge. In most cases,
>     DQS is arriving < 5% tCK of the SDCLK edge in the early case, and
>     it does not make sense to delay the DQS strobe almost a full clock
>     cycle and add extra latency to each Write burst just to make the
>     two edges align exactly. In this case, we are guilty of making a
>     decision for the customer without telling them we are doing it so
>     that we don't have to provide the above explanation to every customer.
>     They don't need to know it.
>     "
> 
> This patch adds the correction described above, that is if the MPWLDECTRx
> value is over 0x148, the value is corrected back to 0x0.
> 
> [1] https://community.nxp.com/thread/456246
> 
> Signed-off-by: Marek Vasut <marex at denx.de>
> Cc: Stefano Babic <sbabic at denx.de>
> ---


Applied to u-boot-imx, thanks !

Best regards,
Stefano Babic


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