Low-end FPGA mezzanine standard

Anyone know if there's a standard(ish) for simple mezzanine cards for FPGA
boards?

I know about things like FMC and HSMC which are very 'high end' - multi
gigabit transceivers, expensive connectors.  There's also Arduino, which is
simple and low pin count, but everything is designed to talk to a dumb slow
Atmega (which usually means putting another Atmega on the mezzanine card and
talking via SPI).  Or there's Raspberry Pi, but again it's assumes you have
slow I/O and things like Ethernet and USB already exist on the CPU board.

Is there anything between the two?  Something like an Arduino-scale system
but with a $10 FPGA in mind rather than an 8 bit micro or a $1000 FPGA.  For
instance, an 100M Ethernet PHY which is just the phy rather than a
memory-mapped MAC, and so just presents an RMII or SMII interface.  Or a
USB2 ULPI PHY.  Having a microcontroller on the board is OK (USB offload is
a useful task), just drinking it through an SPI straw is not.

I found:
http://www.wvshare.com/column/Accessory_Boards.htm?1
which seems to be cheap boards all over ebay that are rather Arduino-like
while intended for FPGAs, but there doesn't seem to be much of a community
around them (in other words, they might disappear tomorrow).

Any other ideas?

Thanks
Theo

Theo Markettos <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Anyone know if there's a standard(ish) for simple mezzanine cards for FPGA
> boards?

> I know about things like FMC and HSMC which are very 'high end' - multi
> gigabit transceivers, expensive connectors.  There's also Arduino, which is
> simple and low pin count, but everything is designed to talk to a dumb slow
> Atmega (which usually means putting another Atmega on the mezzanine card and
> talking via SPI).  Or there's Raspberry Pi, but again it's assumes you have
> slow I/O and things like Ethernet and USB already exist on the CPU board.

> Is there anything between the two?  Something like an Arduino-scale system
> but with a $10 FPGA in mind rather than an 8 bit micro or a $1000 FPGA.  For
> instance, an 100M Ethernet PHY which is just the phy rather than a
> memory-mapped MAC, and so just presents an RMII or SMII interface.  Or a
> USB2 ULPI PHY.  Having a microcontroller on the board is OK (USB offload is
> a useful task), just drinking it through an SPI straw is not.

> I found:
> http://www.wvshare.com/column/Accessory_Boards.htm?1
> which seems to be cheap boards all over ebay that are rather Arduino-like
> while intended for FPGAs, but there doesn't seem to be much of a community
> around them (in other words, they might disappear tomorrow).

> Any other ideas?

store.hackaday.com/products/arduino-compatible-fpga-shield ?

-- 
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

Uwe Bonnes <bon@hertz.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote:
> store.hackaday.com/products/arduino-compatible-fpga-shield ?

Thanks.  I found that earlier, but it's the wrong direction.  I already have
an FPGA (a Cyclone IV E EP4CE22, with no transceivers), I want to connect it
via a high-ish bandwidth link to the outside world (via USB 2, 100M
Ethernet, whatever), but I don't want to commit to a protocol, I just want
to add a header and use existing modules.

The above seems to be intended to add an FPGA to an Arduino.  As the Spartan
6 LX doesn't have any high speed transceivers, it seem doesn't add anything
to the FPGA I already have.

Theo

On 11/26/2014 7:12 PM, Theo Markettos wrote:
> Uwe Bonnes <bon@hertz.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote:
>> store.hackaday.com/products/arduino-compatible-fpga-shield ?
>
> Thanks.  I found that earlier, but it's the wrong direction.  I already have
> an FPGA (a Cyclone IV E EP4CE22, with no transceivers), I want to connect it
> via a high-ish bandwidth link to the outside world (via USB 2, 100M
> Ethernet, whatever), but I don't want to commit to a protocol, I just want
> to add a header and use existing modules.
>
> The above seems to be intended to add an FPGA to an Arduino.  As the Spartan
> 6 LX doesn't have any high speed transceivers, it seem doesn't add anything
> to the FPGA I already have.

When I looked I found a number of modules that would provide external 
interfaces having nothing to do with Arduino.  Check again and nose 
around a bit.

-- 

Rick

On 11/26/2014 7:28 PM, rickman wrote:
> On 11/26/2014 7:12 PM, Theo Markettos wrote:
>> Uwe Bonnes <bon@hertz.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote:
>>> store.hackaday.com/products/arduino-compatible-fpga-shield ?
>>
>> Thanks.  I found that earlier, but it's the wrong direction.  I
>> already have
>> an FPGA (a Cyclone IV E EP4CE22, with no transceivers), I want to
>> connect it
>> via a high-ish bandwidth link to the outside world (via USB 2, 100M
>> Ethernet, whatever), but I don't want to commit to a protocol, I just
>> want
>> to add a header and use existing modules.
>>
>> The above seems to be intended to add an FPGA to an Arduino.  As the
>> Spartan
>> 6 LX doesn't have any high speed transceivers, it seem doesn't add
>> anything
>> to the FPGA I already have.
>
> When I looked I found a number of modules that would provide external
> interfaces having nothing to do with Arduino.  Check again and nose
> around a bit.

Opps, I was thinking of the link *you* gave.  Sorry...

-- 

Rick

I don't have any suggestions but would be very interested if you find anything along those lines. Please post anything you do find.

"PMOD" and Arduino-style wings are the two "standards" I know of.	   
					
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Alexander Kane <ajpkane@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't have any suggestions but would be very interested if you find
> anything along those lines.  Please post anything you do find.

So far I'm leaning toward Arduino, but using some of the non-Atmega boards
that are a bit quicker and pretending that my board is an Arduino shield
(rather than a CPU). For instance:

Intel Galileo release 2: i386 Quark processor that can run Debian (with
hackery, Intel have a critical bug on the LOCKXCHG instruction), has PCIe,
ethernet, on the rel 2 board there's now 12 native GPIOs (up from a derisory
2 on the rel 1 board that I have).  i386 compatibility may be useful for my
application, but this is a bit underpowered.  I don't know if there's a way
to do high speed parallel input though.

BeagleBone: there's a pair of cacheless single-cycle 200MHz Programmable
Realtime Unit CPUs attached to some GPIOs, that might be enough to suck in
data into the main CPU that has Ethernet, USB, etc.  Programming the PRUs
looks a bit fiddly.  Not Arduino pinout.

Arduino Tre: essentially a Beaglebone with an Arduino integrated.  This puts
a 16MHz ATMega 32u4 on the other end of the Arduino pins - so maximum
16MHz x n bits input, assuming it can be convinced to do one word per cycle
(which I'm not sure it can).  I don't think the Arduino pins are accessible
from the PRUs, though I haven't found a pinout (it doesn't exist yet).

Arduino Yun: same idea as the Tre, but with an Atheros AR9331 wifi
controller.  Ignoring the wifi bit, it's the same problem - all the external
IO goes via the slow ATMega.

All of these are higher cost than the average Arduino shield, and
essentially mean committing to a board with a given pinout (since in reality
only Arduino pins XYZ have the necessary properties).  They also mean all
going through a 'full fat' OS to get the high speed I/O.

Theo

mnentwig <24789@embeddedrelated> wrote:
> "PMOD" and Arduino-style wings are the two "standards" I know of.          

Interesting, I wasn't aware of PMOD.  That's the kind of thing I'm after,
but it seems to be limited in both pinout and speed.  For instance, there's
a 100M ethernet but you have to talk to it by SPI.  Likewise the only USB is
a UART.  So a 'parallel PMOD' is roughly what I'm looking for.

Theo

>Anyone know if there's a standard(ish) for simple mezzanine cards for
FPGA
>boards?
>
>I know about things like FMC and HSMC which are very 'high end' - multi
>gigabit transceivers, expensive connectors.  There's also Arduino, which
is
>simple and low pin count, but everything is designed to talk to a dumb
slow
>Atmega (which usually means putting another Atmega on the mezzanine card
and
>talking via SPI).  Or there's Raspberry Pi, but again it's assumes you
have
>slow I/O and things like Ethernet and USB already exist on the CPU board.
>
>Is there anything between the two?  Something like an Arduino-scale
system
>but with a $10 FPGA in mind rather than an 8 bit micro or a $1000 FPGA. 
For
>instance, an 100M Ethernet PHY which is just the phy rather than a
>memory-mapped MAC, and so just presents an RMII or SMII interface.  Or a
>USB2 ULPI PHY.  Having a microcontroller on the board is OK (USB offload
is
>a useful task), just drinking it through an SPI straw is not.
>
>I found:
>http://www.wvshare.com/column/Accessory_Boards.htm?1
>which seems to be cheap boards all over ebay that are rather Arduino-like
>while intended for FPGAs, but there doesn't seem to be much of a
community
>around them (in other words, they might disappear tomorrow).
>
>Any other ideas?
>
>Thanks
>Theo
>
 
     http://enterpoint.co.uk/ has both 10/100 and 10/100/1000 Phys along
with other
fpga interface stuff in their standard pinout. As well I know of waveshare
(also 
available from various folks on ebay) who have a cheap 10/100 phy

http://www.wvshare.com/product/DP83848-Ethernet-Board.htm 

Peter Van Epp
     
 	   
					
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