Low-end FPGA mezzanine standard

Anyone know if there's a standard(ish) for simple mezzanine cards for FPGA boards?

I know about things like FMC and HSMC which are very 'high end' - multi gigabit transceivers, expensive connectors. There's also Arduino, which is simple and low pin count, but everything is designed to talk to a dumb slow Atmega (which usually means putting another Atmega on the mezzanine card and talking via SPI). Or there's Raspberry Pi, but again it's assumes you have slow I/O and things like Ethernet and USB already exist on the CPU board.

Is there anything between the two? Something like an Arduino-scale system but with a $10 FPGA in mind rather than an 8 bit micro or a $1000 FPGA. For instance, an 100M Ethernet PHY which is just the phy rather than a memory-mapped MAC, and so just presents an RMII or SMII interface. Or a USB2 ULPI PHY. Having a microcontroller on the board is OK (USB offload is a useful task), just drinking it through an SPI straw is not.

I found:

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which seems to be cheap boards all over ebay that are rather Arduino-like while intended for FPGAs, but there doesn't seem to be much of a community around them (in other words, they might disappear tomorrow).

Any other ideas?

Thanks Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos
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store.hackaday.com/products/arduino-compatible-fpga-shield ?

--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de 

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt 
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Reply to
Uwe Bonnes

Thanks. I found that earlier, but it's the wrong direction. I already have an FPGA (a Cyclone IV E EP4CE22, with no transceivers), I want to connect it via a high-ish bandwidth link to the outside world (via USB 2, 100M Ethernet, whatever), but I don't want to commit to a protocol, I just want to add a header and use existing modules.

The above seems to be intended to add an FPGA to an Arduino. As the Spartan

6 LX doesn't have any high speed transceivers, it seem doesn't add anything to the FPGA I already have.

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

When I looked I found a number of modules that would provide external interfaces having nothing to do with Arduino. Check again and nose around a bit.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Opps, I was thinking of the link *you* gave. Sorry...

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

I don't have any suggestions but would be very interested if you find anything along those lines. Please post anything you do find.

Reply to
Alexander Kane

"PMOD" and Arduino-style wings are the two "standards" I know of.

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Reply to
mnentwig

So far I'm leaning toward Arduino, but using some of the non-Atmega boards that are a bit quicker and pretending that my board is an Arduino shield (rather than a CPU). For instance:

Intel Galileo release 2: i386 Quark processor that can run Debian (with hackery, Intel have a critical bug on the LOCKXCHG instruction), has PCIe, ethernet, on the rel 2 board there's now 12 native GPIOs (up from a derisory

2 on the rel 1 board that I have). i386 compatibility may be useful for my application, but this is a bit underpowered. I don't know if there's a way to do high speed parallel input though.

BeagleBone: there's a pair of cacheless single-cycle 200MHz Programmable Realtime Unit CPUs attached to some GPIOs, that might be enough to suck in data into the main CPU that has Ethernet, USB, etc. Programming the PRUs looks a bit fiddly. Not Arduino pinout.

Arduino Tre: essentially a Beaglebone with an Arduino integrated. This puts a 16MHz ATMega 32u4 on the other end of the Arduino pins - so maximum

16MHz x n bits input, assuming it can be convinced to do one word per cycle (which I'm not sure it can). I don't think the Arduino pins are accessible from the PRUs, though I haven't found a pinout (it doesn't exist yet).

Arduino Yun: same idea as the Tre, but with an Atheros AR9331 wifi controller. Ignoring the wifi bit, it's the same problem - all the external IO goes via the slow ATMega.

All of these are higher cost than the average Arduino shield, and essentially mean committing to a board with a given pinout (since in reality only Arduino pins XYZ have the necessary properties). They also mean all going through a 'full fat' OS to get the high speed I/O.

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

Interesting, I wasn't aware of PMOD. That's the kind of thing I'm after, but it seems to be limited in both pinout and speed. For instance, there's a 100M ethernet but you have to talk to it by SPI. Likewise the only USB is a UART. So a 'parallel PMOD' is roughly what I'm looking for.

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

FPGA

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slow

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have

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is

community

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has both 10/100 and 10/100/1000 Phys along with other

fpga interface stuff in their standard pinout. As well I know of waveshare (also

available from various folks on ebay) who have a cheap 10/100 phy

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Peter Van Epp

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Reply to
vanepp

Hello Theo,

You can find really bare and cheap ones: DE0-nano:

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or DE0:
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If you want something more advanced, but with reasonable connectors, then have a look at DE1-SoC:
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I think all the development kits that come with the HSMC connector, also have a very small board with like 20 LEDs and 40 IO pins. The one on the left:

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Reply to
Tomas D.

we are working on it, we really are:

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this is only the tip of the iceberg ;) the project will be launhced on indiegogo latest next week, with promo perks at 39EUR (inclusive shipping)

there are at least 3 more different form factors coming, some much more interesting in the sense of "mezzanine".

OzOM - A features

  • 2x ARM cortex A9
  • 32MByte linear NOR flash
  • 1 pmod slot, 4 MIO and 4 FPGA
  • 1 i2c slot (pmod compat) 4 MIO
  • 50 pin header, both edges are "pmod compatible" :)
  • SD Card sockets, supporting:
** SD/SDXC, failsafe primary boot ** Electric Imp wifi cloud ** Toschiba FlashAir - iSDIO wifi ** AK2000 based WiFi cards with built in linux (user accessible!!)
  • microSD - secondary boot, flash media if using SDIO cards in other slot
  • MSP430 as reset and "button" controller
  • LED's
  • uni-taster: reset or reconfigure or clear config or user button
  • CC2564 based BT/BLE either TiWi-uB2 or CC2564MODN
** onboard antenna or U.fl connector
  • USB possible if ULPI phy on baseboard
  • ethernet 100Mbit possible with RMII phy
  • ethernet 10Mbit possible with "phyless - phy"

there are some more features coming in REV 2, the above list was for REV 1 boards that we have at our desk and use to evaluate the design and improve it before pilot series production.

Reply to
Antti

To be clear, I'm actually looking for the other way around. I already have an FPGA, I want to add some I/O via mezzanine cards. Do you plan to make any addon cards that fit into your board?

(adding an FPGA plus its own I/O is a way to go, I suppose, but it starts getting complicated)

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

Hi Theo,

yes, well I have done some standards and produced some addonboards, unfortunately with not so much widespread success.

the need is there, and the existing standards do not covert the needs.

I may have something in the "sleeves" too early to talk, but I can say it ends for me multi-decade search and hunt. Search is over.

Sorry just a little bit too early to talk in public.

br Antti

Reply to
Antti

there's

is

Hi,

you could have a look at this:

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The 2nd picture shows the Papilio Pro board (with Spartan 6 LX9 FPGA), and there are three connectors with 16 GPIOs each, plus power. Two are side-by-side at the bottom.

The physical placement of the three connectors is standardized (sort of). The board in the top picture, with the LCD, makes use of that.

Three are a bunch of (even) smaller FPGA boards from the same vendor, and a XC6LX45 here:

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Using all three connectors provides 48 GPIOs to a stacked board.

This is meant for the hobbyist market using two-layer boards. The whole thing is a hack - takes some practice to assemble the boards without bending pins - but works well enough.

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Reply to
mnentwig

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If one wants something beyond Arduino and Pmod connections, one could use U SB 3.0 extension cabling as the basis for hackable interconnect: Use the U SB 2.0 wires for power, ground and some simple standard interface (I2C, SPI , UART, CAN, etc). That leaves the two USB 3.0 pairs for the serial interf ace of your own devising. With a microprocessor and/or FPGA on each end it 's your choice.

Reply to
jim.brakefield

PGA

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USB 3.0 extension cabling as the basis for hackable interconnect: Use the USB 2.0 wires for power, ground and some simple standard interface (I2C, S PI, UART, CAN, etc). That leaves the two USB 3.0 pairs for the serial inte rface of your own devising. With a microprocessor and/or FPGA on each end it's your choice.

USB connectors have been used and missued already by some projects

for the most hacking experience there is nothing but 100 mil headers

Antti http:/igg.me/at/zynq

Reply to
Antti

yes and IDEA is born, will be public soon - [prelim spec deleted here, sorry]

Antti wishes merry Christmas

Reply to
Antti

FPGA

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se USB 3.0 extension cabling as the basis for hackable interconnect: Use t he USB 2.0 wires for power, ground and some simple standard interface (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, etc). That leaves the two USB 3.0 pairs for the serial in terface of your own devising. With a microprocessor and/or FPGA on each en d it's your choice.

Have nothing against 0.1" headers except their size and the inflexibility o f where the GND and VCC pins are located. One could go to 2mm headers, the y are less available and too small for my fingers.

However, it should be possible to make GND available for, say, any of the o dd pins and VCC available for any of the even pins. This would allow maxim um utilization of the 0.1" spaced pins/holes, giving upwards of twice the d ensity of Pmod connections. Can think of several ways to allow the GND and VCC connections, probably the cheapest and most compact is "solder bridges ": small copper circles with a open area down the middle of the circle.

Reply to
jim.brakefield

Check out the Bugblat devices that support some of the open hardware platforms based on Lattice FPGAs.

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Reply to
jim.tavacoli

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