FPGA Central

Hi all,

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.

http://www.annapmicro.com/wildcard2.html
http://www.elandigitalsystems.com/ac...ies/cf2pce.php

Kind regards,

Iwo

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

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

Kelvin



"John Williams" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:c7ujfo$shq$[email protected]..
> 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 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

Student wrote:
> Flash card interface is a small cup of tea...
>
> Kelvin
>

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

Iwo