Parallella Community

Hi,
is it easily possible to bypass the Epiphany processor?
I am more interested in a pure Zynq-Board for this price. But I need more GPIOs than that, which are on the GPIO-Connector.
Can I get direct access to the Zynq by the PEC_South and PEC_North connector ?


Thanks
Hans-Martin

Even if you did remove the Epiphany, the Zynq is only using enough GPIO pins to make the East connection to the Epiphany. So there would only be enough to wire up to PEC North or South but not both. Also not all of the pins in North and South are connected to signals, many just go to ground. I can't think of a way of making the Epiphany route data to PEC North or South in a general manner, with the Epiphany in place you would have to stick with using the elink protocol.

Tim

Hans-Martin,
You could always try the $199 Zynq7010 based Microzed board if you are just interested in an FPGA board.
http://www.zedboard.org/buy
Andreas

All those GPIOs are pretty fast. If you don't need them to be, a good way to expand them is to use serdes chips. Each differential pair can carry several hundred mbps and you have 24 of those.

Hi,
thanks for all the anwers.
I am familar with zynq but a bit scary withe the epiphany processor.
I need the parallella board as a processing board for an receiver frontend. I have to connect two 14 Bit analog to digital converters to the board, perfectly as LVDS. The sampling rate is about 80 MBits. Should I try to connect this signals to the GPIOs of the FPGA or should I go trough the epiphany? How would you realize this ?

Thanks
Hans-Martin

Hi Hans,

This is most likely off topic, but it is an honest view.

If you really are just after an inexpensive Zynq devboard then the Parallella really isn't for you. It doesn't have many of the features you may need, and hacking it into something like what you want is against all that these guys are trying to acheive - for them the Zynq is the means to an end, a way to integrate their core to a low-end computer system.

However, Digilent are releasing something that sounds closer to what you need - http://digilentinc.com/Products/Detail. ... &Prod=ZYBO. It might be $50 more, but it looks to be a far more general purpose board.

Mike