Hello all,
My team needs to design our own piece of testing equipment for our project. I'll spare you the gory details, and just say that we will need to collect data at some 20 Mbyte/sec (possibly continuously) and somehow get it to a PC computer running Windows. A fancy GUI application will then present this to the operator. A similar link is necessary in the other direction for signal injection.
The FPGA does some data processing, so we can't just buy a data capture card. We may consider a capturing card to interface with the FPGA digitally.
So my question is: What's your recommendation for the PC-FPGA communication? Given a fairly skilled engineering team and a management that understands this is not a cheap quickie (but still wants to keep costs and efforts at a minimum, of course) what would you suggest? USB? PCIe? Ethernet? Capture data from debug pins? Something else?
And: Can anyone give me an idea about what we're up against (costs and time) based upon experience?
Purchasing equipment and IP cores is fine as long as the costs can be justified in terms of saved engineering time. It's our own salaries weighted against spending the money on products (with due risk calculations and stuff).
Thanks in advance, Bill