Adaptor to PCI

Sub forum for Parallella daughter cards and accessories

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Adaptor to PCI

Postby sidewaiise » Wed Nov 05, 2014 10:25 pm

Hi,

I have a unique architecture in mind that would require interfacing with a PCI card. Is there any possibility of creating an adapter from PCI to the Proprietary connectors on the board, and then creating some driver to use it as PCI?

I'm new to parallella - I think the concept is awesome and would like to make it work with existing PCI.

Thanks,
sidewaiise
 
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Re: Adaptor to PCI

Postby FHuettig » Wed Nov 05, 2014 11:11 pm

Hi,

Do you really mean PCI (ancient technology) or PCIe (current)? Either is possible but would require some "smarts" on the adapter, probably another FPGA. The Parallella's GPIO pins don't have the fast transceivers needed to talk PCIe nor are there enough of them to talk PCI. It would be a job either way, but certainly possible.
-- Fred -- Hardware Guy --
FHuettig
 
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Location: Lexington, MA, USA

Re: Adaptor to PCI / Passive backplane

Postby G4GUO » Sun Nov 16, 2014 10:17 am

I have been thinking about how to stack multiple Parallella boards and have been looking at the forum for inspiration.

My current thought is a samtec to edge connector board. This would bring the pins out along the long edges of the board.
This would allow the boards to be plugged into 2 backplanes one on either side. The boards can be secured using the
mounting holes at each end. By turning over each alternate Parallella board the North and South connectors could be
connected correctly. Cooling could be done with a fan as the structure would trap heat.

The main issue for my application would be the bandwidth of the Backplane. For the Epiphany chips I don't believe
this would be a problem. However the LVDS pins on the Zynq are capable (if I have read the spec correctly) of handling
serial data at up to 1.085 GBits/s

Application specific backplanes could be developed for specialist use (high speed connectors for the Zynq for example).
The backplanes should be fairly simple to layout (lots of straight lines) and it should be possible to keep the traces between
boards very simple.

Hopefully someone will run with this idea or improve on it, to get the price down obviously these would need to be manufactured in quantity.

I am still looking for a suitable edge connector format, it must allow the passage of high speed data, be reliable,
inexpensive, robust, have PCB footprints available and allow multiple plug and unplug operations, suggestions welcome.

- Charles
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