Compact Flash FPGA card

I

Iwo Mergler

Guest
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/accessories/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.
Click to expand...
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" <jwilliams@itee.uq.edu.au> wrote in message
news:c7ujfo$shq$1@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au...
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
Click to expand...
 
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
Click to expand...
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
 
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