DDRCAL: Failed - any ideas?

I have written the Arria 10 16.1 GSRD image onto my SD card. Upon trying to boot the A10 SoC dev kit I am in an endless loop with the terminal output below. It seems to fail DDR calibration. Any ideas on the problem?

resetting …

U-Boot 2014.10 (Dec 13 2016 - 22:26:32)

CPU : Altera SOCFPGA Arria 10 Platform
BOARD : Altera SOCFPGA Arria 10 Dev Kit
DRAM: WARNING: Caches not enabled
SOCFPGA DWMMC: 0
FPGA: writing ghrd_10as066n2.rbf …
Full Configuration Succeeded.
emif_reset interrupt acknowledged
emif_reset interrupt acknowledged
emif_reset interrupt acknowledged
Error: Could Not Calibrate SDRAM
DDRCAL: Failed
INFO : Skip relocation as SDRAM is non secure memory
Reserving 2048 Bytes for IRQ stack at: ffe346e8
DRAM : 0 Bytes
data abort
pc : [] lr : []
sp : ffe3fff0 ip : 00000016 fp : 00000001
r10: ffd02078 r9 : ffe34ee8 r8 : ffe00054
r7 : ffe1fda8 r6 : 00000000 r5 : 00000000 r4 : ffeff000
r3 : ffe34faf r2 : ffe3c000 r1 : ffe37000 r0 : ffe34ee8
Flags: nzcv IRQs on FIQs on Mode SVC_32
Resetting CPU …

Ah ha! Nevermind, I had the DDR memory card installed on the fabric side, not on the HPS side… Booting fine now.

Hi there,

Although not related to the initial issue posted here, I got the same error when bringing up my own design. I just wanted to share my findings in case someone else gets stuck in the same way.

In my design we are using a different DDR standard to that on the GHRD. This error is clear, the EMIF does not complete configuration of the DDR.

In my case, I had configured the EMIF incorrectly for the chips that we had on the board. If you get this error double check your DDR structure and configuration with a DDR expert.

Note that if you have an engineering sample Silicon, this check is disabled, so you may need to take a deeper look if you fear you are having calibration issues.