PC104+ communication with FPGA using Xilinx IPCore

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has ever use FPGA to communicate with another board that use PC/104 plus bus as the interface? To give a better view, I have one firewire board that uses a PCI-to-1394 host chip and another board that has an FPGA on it. I would like to control the firewire by using the FPGA. Does anyone has any suggestion on how to do this?

I've tried using Xilinx PCi IPCore but did not work. I was wondering if I might need to use OPB bridge instead. I am open to any suggestion.

Cheers!

Reply to
awa
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Using PCI shouldn't be a problem but if your board is effectively the processor master then you need to configure the other card using the IDSEL lines and configuration cycles. It is possible your FPGA card does bot support driving the IDSEL lines but some simple mods can usually sort that out. Clocks and bus grant/request lines can also be an issue.

Otherwise your PCI core may limit your ability to act as master depending on how ir is implemented. Our core implements these additional features as a tag on and we can configure the target function from the internal OPB bus allowing the target function capability of the FPGA board.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

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Reply to
John Adair

Hello John,

Are you suggesting that the FPGA board should be the master instead of target? In one of my discussion in other threads, someone suggested that the link layer chip (PCI-to-1394 chip) should be set as master (i.e. to continue asserting grant value). At this point, I'm getting more confuse because I don't see how the other signals such as FRAME# or IRDY# (that is initiator driven signal) will be produce by the link layer chip. Could you help to clear this point?

Reply to
awa

You will need something in your system that configures the PCI registers of each device. If you are using a motherboard host then usually that will do this configuration. Bus mastering, or initiator, function depends on whether your device supports the mode or not. Sometimes devices are slave (target) only which then then needs another device to do reading and writing of the target device.

Signals like Frame# can be input, output, or both depending on the modes supported by any given device. If your 1394 chip supports initiator mode then it should be able to drive lines appropriately. The chip will still need it's PCI config registers set up by the overall master of the system. Hope that is clearer.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

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Reply to
John Adair

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