[time-nuts] XRPU hardware on the current marketplace

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Sun Dec 30 01:48:14 EST 2007


> Has anyone built this kind of device from something else than the VCC
> HOT1 FPGA board? Is there some directly competing product that I
> should know about, or something like that?

I'm very interested in this area, but haven't actually done anything beyond 
surf the web looking for something that fits my budget and interests.

I think a major part of the problem is that bleeding edge silicon technology 
as used by up-to-date FPGAs doesn't fit with 5V PCI.  (The specs call for 11V 
spikes when the reflections are out to get you.)

Most PCs have 5V PCI slots because most PCI add in cards are keyed for 5V 
slots.  I haven't seen any motherboards with 3V only PCI slots, but maybe I'm 
not looking in the right place.  In any case, I haven't seen any Xilinx 
development boards setup for 3V only.

My straw man is to find an inexpensive board with FPGA and not much else that 
will plug into a PCI slot.  I'm expecting to have to build a small daughter 
card with a few coax connectors, level converters and whatever.

Maybe the right answer is to wait until cheap PC motherboards have 
PCI-express slots.  (Servers have already switched to PCI-Express.)

The best I've found so far is a Spartan 3 on Raggedstone1 
  http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/raggedstone1.html
But the connectors don't have any ground pins and there aren't any mounting 
holes.


-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.






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