LPC or PCI design?

Hello All,

In the past I have used Ethernet and USB to capture data from various devices to a PC. I am having to connect a fair number of devices that require some substantial buffering and processing first (i.e.: 500+ MB).

To simplify the project I am looking at connecting my technology to the LPC buses found inside P4 (modern) computers. This appears to be an excellent interface to transfer data quickly to a PC. The other option is to use a PCI DAQ card and capture all data that way.

Has anyone here successfully interfaced their projects to the LPC bus inside a P4 system (like a HP Evo)?

I would appreciate any feedback.

I have been able to determine that I would need some kind of strobe line to control when my device communicates on the LPC bus. I believe this is done now via a GPIO line on the Intel chipset. Again, any info or experience you may have with this would be helpful.

Regards,

John Bordynuik JBI

Reply to
John Bordynuik
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Not that I have an answer for you -- my background is PCI -- but is that

500mb a single block of data to move, or are you trying to move that much per second ?? (i.e. are you streaming the data and if so, what is your peak data rate ??)
Reply to
John Barrett

John Bordynuik selects "Not that I have an answer for you -- my background is PCI -- but is that 500mb a single block of data to move, or are you trying to move that much per second ?? (i.e. are you streaming the data and if so, what is your peak data rate ??)"

Hi John,

Some background... I have designed many data recovery systems in the past and what I am finding is that I need a consistent high-speed interface in a PC to transfer pre-processed data from a custom drive . I am now having to recover 3490E tapes (36-track) and slow the drives down to get a really good read on really bad tapes.

I am streaming data at 5MB to 20MB/sec. I would like to interface directly to a PC and use it to capture and process the info. It would be nice to have an interface fast enough to allow for future designs (faster streaming).

Most P4 PCs are selling for $260-300 off lease and cost less than a DAQ board. Cost is an issue because I usually have large numbers of tapes to read (thousands) and need to use many drives.

John Bordynuik

Reply to
John Bordynuik

USB and FireWire both meet those specifications with rates up to or above

50MB/S (480mb/s for usb 2.0, 400mb/s or 800mb/s for FireWire)

Wide-SCSI should also be able to keep up with those kinds of rates, if your drives are SCSI interfaced, or you build a SCSI translator

Otherwise you are looking at an atmega 32 bit microcontroller with on-chip USB to do the grunt work of talking to the drive and pumping the data upstream

or a similar FPGA/CPLD solution if the faster atmega chips cant keep up with the data rate from the drive (the primary difference is that the FPGA/CPLD solution can internally use what amounts to DMA to transfer data from the drive to memory and memroy to USB without the microcontroller portion of the core having to handle the data on a byte by byte basis)

Reply to
John Barrett

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