Compact Flash FPGA card

I don't know of any other cards, but some second hand comments about the Wildcard:

Someone I spoke to recently was complaining bitterly that the WildCard's communication interface between the FPGA and the PCMCIA bus is extremely narrow and slow, basically he was forced to do single-byte programmed reads/writes across that interface. Yuck.

So, it seems to make the idea of using the Wildcard as a computational accelerator/coprocessor pretty useless - you just re-invent the bus-bound architecture...

It may just be a problem with the host drivers, rather than the WildCard architecture itself, I'm not sure. If anyone from Annapolis is reading this it would be interesting to get clarification.

Regards,

John

Flash card interface is a small cup of tea...

Kelvin

John,

thanks for the input. I'm mainly interested in transferring a stream of data at 500KByte/sec, with tough real-time constraints. With current hand-held/laptop devices the choice seems to be USB1.1 or CF.

USB1.1 is pretty much at its limit with this. It works, but I have to use 8MB of buffer memory to cover the times when the OS decides to go away and do something else for a few seconds.

I was hoping to use some sort of DMA transfer via CF, to move that buffer memory into the main memory and stop the OS from interfering.

Kind regards,

Iwo

Yes, and I'm trying to design a better teabag. ;^)

Iwo