PCI plug n play and Graphics card implementation

Hello all,

Can someone please answer the following questions?

  1. I am using a VGA graphics core with 60Hz refresh rate and 640x480 pixels (24bit), requiring about 25MHz xtal. The FPGA development board comes equipped with that, the problem is how to provide a fast pixel access. The SDRAM connected has an access time of 15ns, if I could just come up with some method to update the SRAM contents very quickly, i can display moving graphics onto the monitor using FPGA? Are there any simple graphic chips which can do this job for custom display designs without using the processors?

  1. The second question indirectly relates to the PCI, however, before that, can someone please tell me exactly how plug and play works? When the computer boots what steps are taken and how the system determine how many legal devices are connected to the pci.

  2. The base address register, it is not hardwired but assigned on the fly? I have problems understanding the configuration step in the pci core. Any comments for a starter?

Thanks in advance

Mak

Reply to
mansoor.naseer
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I'm responding to your first question about moving graphics.

What development board are you using? And how much memory is available and how is it organized?

By moving graphics, do you mean 2D or 3D graphics?

You have two choices: just in time rendering implementation or a double buffered display. The just in time rendering display doesn't require as much memory and it works great for text and simple 2D graphics. An example of this is the older arcade games (Pac Man, Space Invaders, Atari 2600). A double buffer display is memory hungry and it is used by the 3D cards of today.

Which method are you intending on using?

Derek

Reply to
DerekSimmons

When you say VGA what do you exactly mean? VGA was an implementation of a graphics adapter made by IBM. It became the standard for PCs because other venders picked it up and supported it on the PC.

Are you trying to create an implementation of a VGA card or are you trying to create display card for displaying images from a PC using the PCI bus?

Derek

Reply to
DerekSimmons

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: > 2. The second question indirectly relates to the PCI, however, before

During the configuration phase of the PCI, the kernel probes the PCI bus for any PCI devices using the PCI configuration commands. If a device is found, the following steps are taken:

  1. Find out how much address space the device needs for each base address.
  2. Allocate the address space within the kernel, usually by updating some address table.
  3. Tell the PCI device to use address xxxx for base address y

During the configuration phase, obviously you can't address the PCI device with the I/O space or memory space address. You use the device number, bus number, function number, and register number to address. The PCI host chip then asserts corresponding the IDSEL pin of the PCI device to notify that it is being configured.

hth,

jz

Reply to
Jason Zheng

Thank you for the response,

I am making a simple 640x480 24bit graphics card which can be updated through the PCI bus. The core reads the current pixel to display using the contents from the onboard SRAM. I am using AVNET's S3-1500 demonstration board with onboard Cypress SRAM 1MB (32bit). It also resides an ADV7123 Triple Video DAC converter for video display (RGB-

8 bits each).

I only need to update a 2D image on the screen which will only display text images not moving graphics, for instance a simple touch screen menu.

Whats double buffering? Is it more suitable for the current application. Also cant i just use the serial port for updating the contents of SRAM since its just a text image? Furthermore, what might happen if I try writing to a specific address while the graphics core is access it for reading?

Thanks

Reply to
Mak

In the next couple of weeks I'm putting the finishing touches on a triangle rasterization library. My development platform is a Stratix II EDK/SDK. I'll also be posting it to the NIOS II forum website when finished. I was wondering if you were interested and if there was any other interest.

Thanks, Derek

Reply to
DerekSimmons

When

This is too big a subject for a newsgroup posting. You should pick up the Mindshare PCI book. When you've finished reading that telephone book, you'll have a good idea what goes on.

First, buy that book. :)

Second, the base address register is assigned by the host during enumeration. The host reads each BAR, which you must preload with a mask that indicates the size of the required space. This mask is simply 1s in the significant bits, so for example setting the BAR to

0xFFFF0000 would request a 64k space (the four LSBs indicate the type of space/etc). If the host decides it can support that BAR, it writes a valid base address to the BAR (overwriting the mask).

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

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