(also posted to s.e.d.)
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...
- Do everything in the FPGA. Possible but nasty.
- 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.
- Use an embedded board-level PC,
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