micheleandClaude Sonnet 5
68f3c5e403
Root-causes and fixes the real, disclosed defect left open at the end of the previous STEP20 commit: the board-level SPI host interface produced wrong compute results when jobs were dispatched with realistic (widely time-separated) pacing, even though job registration itself was already confirmed correct at the dependency_manager handshake. Root cause: nms_weight_packed.v and nms_activation_replicated.v both used a REGISTERED SRAM read (rd_data_reg <= mem[addr], one full clock of latency), but nms_memory_manager_stream_wide.v's own read-ahead pipeline (its `rd_pending` bit) is designed around a COMBINATIONAL read -- a request issued this cycle produces data already valid to capture the very next cycle. A busy, multi-tile job (e.g. the STEP19 D-Stress regression, 16 tiles/neuron) never exposes the mismatch, since its own weight/activation prefetch always runs far enough ahead that any given tile has been sitting stable in the SRAM for many cycles by the time it's actually consumed. An uncontested single-tile job has zero such margin: its one tile's read fires on the exact edge the data nominally becomes ready, landing squarely on the missing cycle and permanently latching stale/zero data. Fixed by making both SRAMs' reads combinational, with an explicit same-cycle fill/read address-match bypass for the one hazard a plain combinational read alone would still miss. No FSM, arbiter, or SDRAM controller logic was touched. Verified (Verilator, per this project's own standing DEC-0004 protocol): - tb_fpga_neural_v2_top_smoke.v: 11/11 PASS -- single job, back-to-back jobs, a realistic ~85us-gap job pair, and a parametric sweep of inter-job gaps (100ns/5000ns/50000ns). - STEP19 D-Stress N=2: 49788 cycles, 256/256 bit-exact -- identical cycle count to before this fix (zero regression). - STEP19 D-Stress N=4: 49771 cycles, 256/256 bit-exact -- identical cycle count to before this fix (zero regression). - tb_sdram_unified_backend.v (40/40) and tb_spi_host_bridge.v (18/18) reconfirmed unaffected. The physical SPI host interface is now verified correct end-to-end. Real synthesis/P&R of the board-level top (fpga_neural_v2_top.v) is the deliberate next step, not yet performed this round. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013xXuuRUWZScuo1DeYJxs3v