John Williams wrote:
> Hi Iwo,
>
> Iwo Mergler wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for a CF FPGA prototyping card. Do you know
>> of such a beast?
>>
>> The closest I could find so far is the Wildcard, combined
>> with a CF to PCMCIA adapter.
>
>
> 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

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