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We're considering a new product, a spectroscopy controller, that would need a fair hunk of data-moving power and gigabit Ethernet capability to talk to a host system. We would center it on a largish FPGA that would run the actual physics, but we still need supervision, self-test, local maintanance capability (maybe just RS-232) and the Ethernet stuff. Possibilities include...

  1. Do everything in the FPGA. Possible but nasty.

  1. Use a cpu chip on the main board, next to the FPGA. Both powerQuicc and Blackfin chips have the horsepower and include the gbit PHY. Both run uC Linux.

  2. Use an embedded board-level PC,
3a PC/104+. Expensive. 3b Some small-form-factor "regular" pc motherboard. Cheap.

both 3's would probably use the PCI bus to talk to the FPGA.

Economically, and for speedy development, 3b sounds best. Has anybody done things like this with one of the tiny PC motherboards? Can you recommend a form-factor and a vendor? We'd need gbit Ethernet and a free PCI slot to interface to the process. We could maybe live with

100M Ethernet if we were confident that an upgrade would be available in a year or two.

The thing that scares me about using an embedded PC is that the product lifetimes tend to be short.

John

Reply to
John Larkin
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That's a possibility. It would be a *big* pci board, sort of a tail-wagging-the-dog sort of thing. The old classic biggest-legal PCI formfactor might almost work, but there's no reason to follow standards here. And I suppose there's no law that says we have to get our power through the pci motherboard connector.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Now how long have you been participating in this group, and how many times have you seen folks being told not to multipost, but to crosspost instead?

--
Tim Wescott
Control systems and communications consulting
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott
Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
Reply to
Tim Wescott

I thought about posting to the embedded group after I posted here, and noted it in my second post. That said, I don't give a rat's ass how many self-appointed netcops I annoy. Unless I actually enjoy annoying them...

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I wouldn't recommend uClinux. No MMU makes it hard to run generic software. An ARM with is the best buy at this moment. There is loads of software that will run on ARM out there.

EPIA sells very nice & small PC boards these days. Including fanless.

--
Programmeren in Almere?
E-mail naar nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
Reply to
Nico Coesel

On a sunny day (Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:09:25 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

John, also try comp.arch.fpga there are some realy nice little boards you can buy that some of those guys make.

PCI or PCIe?

Will PCI even be around 5 years from now?

Cannot give you advice, I would personally prefer a _real_ processor, not FPGA based, and x86 compatible, makes software development easier. Getting Linux running on a power PC in an FPGA may take a lot of time. But they have complete boards working with that.

Dunno where you slice - for speed- but if some could be PC soft, nice.

Not enough data beep.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Eh, I probably should have kept my mouth shut -- I manage to restrict my net-copping to multi-posting, mostly because it's the only sort of net-copping that seems to do any good (throwing gasoline on flame wars just doesn't seem to calm things down, somehow).

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Do you need to implement control loops in software?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
Reply to
Tim Wescott

Yes, Via has the EPIA line of Mini-ITX boards. you can also get intel based boards. Via has a neat little Pico, bit larger than a deck of cards, based on the C7 but no Gbit.

formatting link
We currently use a Nexcom Minit-ITX board, Core2duo with 2 Gbit ports. I've seen products use windows embedded with these boards.

I have a EPIA in the shop, got it from these guys

formatting link
. The C7 1g is about as fast as a P3 800mhz.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

its all david bowie's fault.

Cheers Terry

Reply to
Terry Given

I had a similar situation several years ago. The PCI board I came up with was about 8"x10", which worked out well because it allowed ZIF BGA DUT sockets to protrude from the case. We used an IBM x86 server chassis for the host.

--
Keith
Reply to
krw

Kontron used to promise 10 years for their embedded stuff.

Reply to
The Real Andy

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