I am working on a channel emulator which is based on a FPGA development board and a custom based RF board connected to the FPGA board via daughter card connection (240 pins). I was using WARP 2 (Hard PowerPC Processor in the FPGA) till now, but am looking for a new FPGA board as WARP 2 is discontinued because Xilinx has stopped the manufacture of SystemAce. Below are my requirements.
- A hard processor (Preferably a PowerPC).
- 240 I/O pin from the development board.
- USB, Serial and Ethernet ports.
- SD Card slot.
- Clock support.
Can someone suggest me some options ? I checked Xilinx website and found some FPGA based on Microblaze, but I am not sure if it can give me enough throughput to run my computational intensive application. One more problem with using Microblaze is that, my application uses many shared libraries like Boost, MySql and I would have to cross compile them for Microblaze which would be difficult as its not a well know architecture for microprocessors. I understand Microblaze is well know in the world of FPGA, but its not very well know in the application domain like ARM, PowerPC, x86 etc, please correct me if I am wrong.
If I go for V6/V7 FPGA of Xilinx, the development boards have few I/O pins (100 - 160) and I need at least 250 pins. What are my other options ?
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