Parallella Community

Hi ,

I am building a real time data acquisition and processing system for one of the systems that I work on. The system has a SPI interface to send or receive data. The data is transmitted from the device at rate of 12 Mbps in in packets of size 26 32-bit integers. Now parallellla does not have a separate SPI connector so I am looking for some sort of solution to make the interface work and from what I can see I have a few options :

1. Use a USB to SPI apater like FTDI VA800A-SPI ( http://www.digikey.sg/product-detail/en ... ND/4487376 ). This one have relevant drivers from FTDI and can be interfaced to the USB port on parallella.

2. Use the porcupine break out board and then use the GPIO pins as SPI with the relevant drivers.But I am not sure if the GPIO pins can handle the high clock speeds that I would need the supply on the SCLK pin for reading all the data.

3. Use the porcupine break out board and simulate SPI interface on the FPGA and then use the FPGA connector pins for communication with the system. Here I can supply my own clock to the FPGA design for reading all the data correctly.

I would like really prefer to use the GPIO pins if I can as this would involve least amount of extra work for creating the connections.

I would really love to get the views from the parallella community what people have been using for interfacing the parallella with SPI and what would be a good solution for my situtaion with high speed data rates.

Cheers,
Anshu.

IIRC the Zynq has two SPI hard IP cores and it should just be a matter of to route these out to GPIO pins. Not sure what the performance would be, but I imagine that details could be found in the Zynq documentation.

Regards,

Andrew