Terminating an Aurora link in a PC

Hi

I have two devices communicating via an Aurora link (single lane, full duplex) over SFP + optical cables. I need to replace one of them with a PC (testing, emulation etc etc)

I see several (HITEC for example) offering PCIe cards featuring Kintex FPGA that look like they would do the job but I don't have a resource to do any HDL work.

Can anyone recommend an off the shelf card? 

karl.robinsod@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have two devices communicating via an Aurora link (single lane, full duplex) over SFP + optical cables. I need to replace one of them with a PC (testing, emulation etc etc)
> 
> I see several (HITEC for example) offering PCIe cards featuring Kintex FPGA that look like they would do the job but I don't have a resource to do any HDL work.
> 
> Can anyone recommend an off the shelf card? 

My understanding of Aurora is that it's a very low level protocol
and therefore it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a standard
product that would connect your PC to a "generic" Aurora device.
It's a bit like saying you want a board to run Cat6 cable into
your PC without specifying what protocol it needs to talk.

There must be some protocol running on top of Aurora between your
two devices.  If you didn't design the devices yourself, I would
suspect that whoever made them would be a better place to start
looking for a PC connection.

-- 
Gabor

Sure, it's low level frames - just like Ethernet frames. I want to be able to receive and transmit raw frames.

We developed the devices at both ends. We could do the work but why spend (scarce) resources recreating something that maybe already exists?

karl.robinsod@gmail.com wrote:
> We developed the devices at both ends. We could do the work but why spend
> (scarce) resources recreating something that maybe already exists?

That seems pretty niche.  In particular it's an FPGA protocol, so it's
expected that you're going to be adding hardware to it.  It isn't a
something you would buy off the shelf.

However I'd suggest looking around demo projects for Aurora that might be
available - maybe there's something there that you can take as-is, or
lightly customise?

If the issue is getting the data from fPGA to the PC, something like
Xillybus might be worth a look.  Depends whether their licensing suits your
model.

Theo

> That seems pretty niche.  In particular it's an FPGA protocol, so it's
> expected that you're going to be adding hardware to it.  It isn't a
> something you would buy off the shelf.

Is it though? I imagine emulating a (not ready yet) FPGA that has an Aurora link to another one would be a common use-case. Anyway, that's OT I guess

I want to take something like a Hitech Global Xilinx Kintex 7 (HTG-K700) with suitable SFP+ daughter board and connect one full duplex Aurora (64B/66B) single lane to the PCIe interface. The goal would be to DMA data frames received from the Aurora link into the host PC's RAM and DMA data frames from the host PC's RAM. Maybe raise an interrupt in the host when the transfer is complete?

I'm guessing it's not a simple as connecting the AXI4 interfaces back to back? ;)