ML505 board Compact Flash

Sorry, but what you are asking for (to write to the CF Card while it is plugged into the ML505 board through PCI Express) is not a standard design. It is possible to access the CF Card from the FPGA and there is an EDK design using MicroBlaze and SystemACE peripheral that is available in the online ML505 reference designs

You will save yourself a lot of time and effort by going down to your local electronics store and picking up a CompactFlash Card Reader/Writer. This should be with the $5-10 range.

Also, there is a PCIe reference design available for the ML505 here:

The bitfiles are included with the board and the documentation on the above page provides the instructions for setting the configuration control switches to get the example design loaded.

Ed McGettigan

-- Xilinx Inc.

I'd add that this bitfile can be loaded through JTAG, bypassing the CF card method altogether. In the JTAG chain you should see 5 components IIRC, being one of the the Virtex5. After programming the completer example application onto it and rebooting, the host PC now sees a virtual memory on the PCIe bus, which can be accessed by ie. Pcitree software. I took this example application as a starting point and modified it to change it into a requester app. One bit of advice, use the PCIe core Plus instead of the hard core. It's much easier to interface with, from an end-user point of view. Unless you need multiple virtual channels and extreme flexibility, core Plus is the way to go.

HTH,

-P@

All advise above is good.

On our project we have been talking to the ML506 (same board with sx50t) using linux. Linux is nice for bringing up pci and pcie cards because utilities like lspci and scanpci are built into the OS. Also drivers are easy to write that make the pci(e) hardware accessible to C programming.

Hi All, Thx for your all replies...I appreciated. Meanwhile I hve solved all this by purchasing a simple CF reader in $5.

Sachin