PCI FIFO Design

Hello,

I needed to get ideas on how to simulate a FIFO interface on the PCI interface. I have a SBC w/ vxWorks and a Communication board in a cPCI chassis. The SBC runs an application that feeds data through the PCI interface to a FIFO on the Comm board. The Comm board has a number of control and status registers and receives data through a single 32-bit memory mapped address (that is the interface to the FIFO on the board). I am not allowed to make any modifications to the application running on the SBC.

For the Comm simulator, I was thinking of using another SBC and ?somehow? configure some of its memory to be setup to respond to the address range for the Comm board. Maybe using shared memory. I could write a program for this SBC to read the memory mapped registers and react to what is being written. I would then ?somehow? get an interrupt whenever any of this memory mapped registers where written to. It would be important to respond quickly, especially for the one register interface to the FIFO. The concern is whether the ISR that copies the data to a buffer be fast enough to simulate the FIFO interface?

Has anybody done this already? Can somebody shed light on the ?somehow?s? that I have? Any other ideas on how to do this simulation?

Javier

Reply to
lionhearted
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Buy a single-port PCI serial card with a DIP 16550, remove the 16550 and emulate it with external software and hardware?

Use a logic analyzer directly on the PCI bus?

Reply to
zwsdotcom

I doubt that approach would work. First, dual port memory is special stuff, so you'd have to find a SBC that could implement it right off the bat. Second, you'd have to implement the FIFO in software, which would severely limit the speed your SBC could respond to input (or to output requests).

I suspect that the minimum level of complexity that you'd need for success would be an FPGA on a PCI board, and emulate the comm board's registers in the FPGA. This is a doable solution, and I'd be astonished if you couldn't buy such a board ready for FPGA firmware off the shelf ready for programming.

--
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Reply to
Tim Wescott

cPCI

on

the

interrupt

would

simulation?

Do you have suggestions for any boards or manufacturer?

Reply to
lionhearted

No, it's been ages since I needed to be involved in that, and at the time we knew we were going to build something on a custom board, so we just used Xilinx's latest PCI eval board.

--
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Reply to
Tim Wescott

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