PCI 64/66 fpga eval boards

Folks,

After search the net for various eval boards, I haven't found the one that I need and afford... that is so oxymoronic... nevertheless, I figured I might try the community before making a decision.

I am looking for an FPGA proto board that sits on a 64/66 PCI on a ATX motherboard. Since we are on a budget we would like to stick with low end devices such as Spartan 3 or Cyclone 2 with possibility to add more FPGA modules as we need them.

I found one at

formatting link

Unfortunately, it seems that it has a 32/33 pci interface.

Any suggestions?

Thank you. Best regards,

-Sanjay

Reply to
fpgabuilder-groups
Loading thread data ...

Hi Sanjay,

I'm afraid I can't answer your question directly, but I can offer some food for thought. Be very careful treading into 64/66 PCI territory. The technology is new(ish), somewhat unproven, and mostly untested. I've had experience with board vendors that flat out lie about the

64/66 capability of the boards or at least they never bothered to test to see if it really worked.

Be sure you REALLY need that extra throughput. Good luck

MJ

Reply to
mljohnson00

Hi,

I do not get exactly what it is you are looking for ? PCI TIM MotherBoard ?

Rgds,

John

a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Reply to
John Aderseen

Hi again,

I have one of

formatting link
plus a couple of TIM processing modules. If ever this is what you are looking for.

Rgds, John

a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Reply to
John Aderseen

John, MJ,

Thank you for the suggestions. I am not sure what TIM stands for but seems like some standard connector/interface for FPGA modules. But thats right, I am looking for a 64bit/66MHz card with fpgas.

I wanted to experiment with some interfaces and needed CPU to communicate with the FPGAs over PCI.

BTW, I am surprised that 64/66 would still be new. I used a 64/66 MHz cPCI core in an FPGA about 3 years ago. And as far as I can tell we did not have any problems with the cPCI based processor boards. Nevertheless, thanks for the heads up.

-sanjay

John Aderseen wrote:

Reply to
fpgabuilder

Texas Instruments Module. See

formatting link

~Dave~

Reply to
Dave

Isn't PCI 64/66 a dead end considering PCI-express these days ?

Reply to
pbdelete

Isn't ISA a dead end considering PCI, yet it is still used !!!!

a écrit dans le message de news: 4474b0be$0$490$ snipped-for-privacy@news.luth.se...

Reply to
John Aderseen

ISA is still used because it's trivial to hack. PCI is anything but.

--
  Keith
Reply to
Keith

Try this UK base company. We have used their products on PCI64.

formatting link

--
Mark
Reply to
qrk

Hopefully not in *new* designs. :-) As far as I can tell, ISA only sticks around in industrial PC boards so that already working systems can be maintained, which makes perfect sense. (There's at least one company out there still making replacement PDP-11 boards, after all...)

Only if you're planning to actually implement the PCI interface yourself... which really only makes sense if you're planning to try to squeeze the last once of performance out of the bus. For most designs, using interface ICs from the likes of PLX Technology make PCI pretty darned friendly to implement to (their chips have options to treat the "card" side of the bus as anything from reasonably sophisticated down to dumb-as-a-PIC). Cypress has an IC that places a dual-port RAM (and a couple of FIFOed mailboxes) across the PCI bus, also making it trivial for even the "dumbest" logic to interface.

USB is quite similar -- unless you're after an education, for the vast majority of designs the various USB interface ICs (e.g., from FTDI) or USB-based microcontrollers with supplied low-level code (from Cypress, Atmel, Microchip, etc) let you worry about the unique aspects of your design rather than interfacing with Yet Another Bus.

For FPGAs or standard-cell logic, there are lots of USB and PCI cores out there from the usual suspects.

---Joel Kolstad

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

What's so hard to understand about "hack"?

Sure, but that's hardly hacking. I've used PLX chips and they're certainly not trivial to use. Even given that the chip simply works, the board layout is 100x harder than ISA. Programming is equally hard (comparatively). Any damned fool can build an ISA channel card with a few 74xx gates. PCI is *hard* even with PLX doing the heavy lifting.

Certainly, but USB ain't ISA either.

Sure, but FPGAs or standard-cell aren't a coupla 74xx buffers either. ISA was a piece of cake for an idiot (and still lives in the ATA connector for those who want to play ;).

--
  Keith
Reply to
krw

Thanks guys for these interesting posts...

Why is ISA still out there ? Look at the PowerPC architecture, there's ISA in it. Look at any PC - there's ISA in it (even if the bus does not come out on connectors on the mobo it's in the chipset). It's still there for legacy issues. Same reason we (well less and less it's true) carry on some of the initial limitations imposed by MD-DOS on our windows systems. When a new std comes out, it usually sticks around some time. Look at the VME bus, still out there ! When those guys from the military make a new equipement, they have to be capable to insure that the technology will still be out there in 20 years (in most Xtreme cases). Some never really did make it through (IBM_PS2 ... SUN_SBUS and a few others).

Rgds, John

"krw" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net...

Reply to
John Aderseen

To each his own.

PCI is just a vehicle for me to get data from the CPU to my logic. It could be anything else for that matter. Like it has been said earlier in the post, there are many vendors with standard pci controllers that cost less than a low end spartan. I therefore, would like to see a board that uses these of the shelf PCI semiconductors. It woudl not be very productive and cost effective to integrate 3rd party PCI core into the fpga. Not sure with PCI Express, but it certainly isn't as easy and cheap to use as PCI.

Reply to
fpgabuilder

Hi Keith,

Ah, sorry, I was thinking "hack" in the "relatively sophisticated endeavor given very few resources... and you might have to crack open a book or two..." sense (like the guy who did a full-up HID USB device using only bit-banging with some low-end AVR microcontroller) rather than the "Make magazine" sense (which is closer to "kinda cool things that, yeah, your beer-guzzling neighbor down the street won't be doing anytime soon, but that smart high school kid next door could probably pull off"). :-) I see your point more clearly now.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

To a certain extent pretty much everybody who ever had to hang a handful of peripherals off of a bus has designed their own bus "standard," it's just that some are more sophisticated than others and only a small handful ever become known outside of a given design gruop. The guys at nVidia, VIA, SiS, etc. have been enjoying themselves coming up with new busses between their north and south bridge chipsets for years now... :-)

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

They're out there. Look for prototyping boards. I had one for the PLX-9054 some time back. Programming them still isn't trivial (as ISA is).

I came to the same conclusion a few years back. Why use a hunk of an *expensive* (at the time about $1K) Virtex-E when a $25 PLX-9054 works out of the gate, sorta.

--
  Keith
Reply to
Keith

John,

The link does not clearly mention PCI 32/33 or PCI 64/66. Looks quite similar to the one from

formatting link
.

What's your experience been with it?

Thanks.

-sanjay

Reply to
fpgabuilder

Sanjay,

I do not renember if this board handles PCI64/66. I can ask Hunt Engineering if you want. However, I am not really sure this is what you're looking for. This is a system I am throwing away for a few euros because I am tired of seing it sleep in my attick ! What exactly is it you are trying to do ? Those TIM fpga modules from Sundance are great but they are tied to the TIM std which may not be the best way to start playing around with fpgas. Modules from alpha-data are great and are PMC modules (meaning you can stick them in your PC easily or in any cPCI system) but they are expensive. Whatever it is I can point you to people from these companies if ever you are interested but I think that you should start of by describing your exact needs.

Thanks,

Rgds,

John

"fpgabuilder" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

Reply to
John Aderseen

John,

I am just trying to make some windows/linux application talk to the FPGAs over PCI in an ATX motherboard. Not wanting to spend too much time getting the PCI hardware to work, I would like to have standard PCI bridge on the PCI board. Hopefully that also comes with any software drivers/API, etc. that I can call in my application to talk to the Logic inside the FPGA.

So it is not something new... well software interfacing will be new to me. But thats where I would like to be as fast as possible. So I do not want to spend any time putting a PCI core into the FPGA and making sure the PCI timing is met.

What kind of FPGAs are on the TIMs that you have?

Thanks.

-sanjay

Reply to
fpgabuilder

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.