FPGA PC104 development board

Well google can find "ISA bus specifications", although I forget the org for home hit.

You could look at using PC104+ and stick with small form factor PCI std, much closer to home with newer parts and much faster and just google groups for PCI FPGA stories.

johnjakson at usa dot com

As a development board manufacturer there isn't a lot point supporting an old interface. The cost of doing a new design don't make a viable business proposition unless the customer is bearing part of the costs or there is a niche market that could have reasonable shipment numbers.

We are looking at PC104PLUS and have already got a board that we did for a customer built and working. It is likely that we will do a PC104PLUS board but no release timescales yet. If some comes along and asks for any reasonable number of such boards they will tend to get done quickly.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

Thank you for your answer John,

A few things more I like to know. First can you please tell me does it then make sense to buy PC104 board with old FPGAs (Xilinx: Spartan, Spartan 2, Virtex E.. or Altera: Flex 10k, ACEX or APEX 2..) if design which I should make must be actual at least next 5 years? Or in other words I want to know if you think that these development boards (with old FPGAs which I listed) will be provided in next five years.

Or you may recommend me if it is better to buy Non-PC104 FPGA development board with new generations of FPGAs and design hardware bridge which will have on one side PC104 bus. I need PC104 interface bus because I work design for physics accelerator where PC104 format and PC104 bus is some kind of standard. I am also interesting in PC104PLUS board, which you have mentioned above? What will contain this borad.

Thank you for answer in advance??

Regards, Amir

Historically FPGAs in general have had exceedingly long lifetimes compared to other chips. However both Xilinx and Altera have obsoleted parts and will continue to do so. If I was starting a new design for a customer I would normally recommend the latest family to maximise lifetime and minimise cost. Sometimes there are a few exceptions to that rule. For instance Spartan-2 is

5V tolerant without external resistors or bus switches. Good for space critical designs.

Lifetimes of development boards tend to be long but products can disappear or be obsoleted. You have no guarantee that a product will be here in 5 years. Other factors can also kill off a board. 64 bit PCI is now disappearing from PC motherboards and may result in 64bit PCI based development boards not having a host system. Are you going to buy a board that you can't buy a host for?

The board we currently have is V2-PRO based. Given that V4 is new and we already use Spartan-3 we probably will go for one of these for a new development board. We are likely to use a similar approach to the Broaddown family with minimalist standard fit of components and allow user selectable modules for the required comms and features. That said we may fit CAN transceivers, high speed serial interfaces(V4 only) and flash memory to the design. The latter two are already working on the V2-Pro design with the high speed link operating successfully at 2.5GBit/s.

If you requirement is likely to be more than one off, or needs a special long term support agreement, then please take this off-line. We can offer a lot more than what we discuss publicly either here or on our website. Any of the emails on our website can be used to contact me. Just mark it for my attention and it will be directed to me.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.