bit file fpga to pc

RS-232 signaling are normally used with asynchronous serial data. Maximum baud rate for most PCs is only 115200 baud. Which is about 11KiB/s. It is simple to write your own VHDL implementation of a transmitter. Ethernet is up to 1000Gib/s. Implementing this is orders of magnitude more complex. For any communications problem, you first need to know how much data you want to send, in how much time.

Regards Anton Erasmus

If RS232 will handle your data rate that will certainly be a lot simpler to get running. The hardest part may be creating some sense of packets or structure to your data so that you can identify the start of each picture. If you can reserve one byte value for a start and make that illegal in the data, that may be the simplest - otherwise you end up looking at either a time-based framing (hard from a PC software perspective), escaping your start code, or something that I pulled once - since data rate wasn't critical, I had the FPGA send a hexadecimal representation in ASCII (2x overhead vs binary) and then defined some start and stop characters. Making the data human readable in a terminal program was an added benefit!

Ethernet in practical terms requires something with "software" type complexity on the embedded side to handle protocols. I mean you can do UDP-and-pray, but its nowhere near as reliable as running RS232 without handshaking.

Oh, one more idea - you can have the FPGA look at the RS232 data line from the PC, not even to decode characters (though that's not hard) but simply use any transition of it to trigger sending of a block of data to the PC. Then the PC simply sends an arbitrary single character each time it wants a block of data.

Or you can go to 9-bit serial, but that makes it harder to have a PC on the other end...

Or you can try to do something with the handshaking lines.

Thanks very much to everyone who took the time to respond. As of right now, data rate and size is not critical. I'm storing pixel data from a line scan CCD in 8 bit grayscale. So, if I can send so many lines of data over serial interface, I should be able to generate an image in a PC using Matlab. Going back to the data bits transfer over RS232, I found the comment bellow interesting for what I'm trying to achieve. Does it mean that I could output in hyperterminal the corresponding grayscale values (0 to 255) corresponding to the pixel data values stored in the fpga memory? If that is the case, I think that I would need to define a state machine that drives a UART that somehow transmit all values stored in fpga memory continuously, once data is transferred I could copy and paste those values into a bit file that I can open in Matlab. Thanks,

Yes, that's a simple and straightforward way to go about it. To keep things simple, you don't strictly need a UART on the FPGA side, just choose a baud rate and fire away. Get a MAX232/MAX3232 for level shifting and you'll be set in terms of hardware.