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COTS FPGA Boards/Kits

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Hi everyone,
Most of my FPGA work has been using prebuilt Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS)cards from various vendors in embedded systems to do a particular function. I have used cards from VMetro(Curtiss Wright) - the FPGA01 and 3 PMC cards, Acromags Virtex 4 PMC card, Alpha-Data's ADm-XRC 5t1, and Gidel,Inc.'s Stratix IV based CamStim cards to name a few.
Using each of these cards requires coming up to speed on their specific ways of dealing with the cards resources (memory, io,d/a's etc) and also using their Software Development Kit (SDKs). A fewo of the vendors provide Simulink blocksets particular to their card for use with Xilinx System Generator or Alters's DSP Builder.
In the near future I hope to review these various boards I've worked in the review section of this site. I'm hoping that other users of such cards will join in and express their opinions on the cards they have used. Also if you know of any other sites which contain such reviews a quick link to them would be nice.
I'll leave it at that for now and I'll start working on my first review.

cwood

Discussion started by Chuck Woodring , on 14 December 06:42 PM

Replies

Chuck Woodring, 2009-12-27 20:49:51

Ben,
When I started this discussion I was hoping users of various development kits and high level FPGA based cards would chime in on their experiences, likes and dislikes about particular cards they have used. I have to admit with the holidays I have not gotten far in writing up a my thoughts on the Alpha-Data ADM-XRC5T1 card I've been using lately.
In my particular case, I work on Hardware in the Loop (HWIL) simulators and use FPGAs to emulate sensors and interact with other pieces of hardware/computers in real time. Most of the interfaces are unique although they are basically control logic or DSP type coprocessing functions performed on digital data streams. The interfaces may range from a simple low speed parallel interface to 120 channels of high speed data running through a bunch of filtering. Right now the the more processing I can push onto the FPGA card the better and with every design I complete we always want to add more. That is why I am always looking for new cards/development tools that can make this work easier.
I am not too concerned about portability but I am trying to reach a common approach where we use one or two vendors cards for all the work. This is difficult due to cards going out of production or our requirements advancing past the capabilities of the existing cards. Things change so fast in this field that if all goes well I'll be busy for a number of years just trying to keep up.
I will take a look at the NB3000 soon. Are there any other cards/vendors you have used?

v/r,

Chuck

Benjamin Jordan, 2009-12-27 05:42:09

Hi Chuck,

Are your designs predominantly for mil/aero use, consumer/commercial or industrial? Do the cards you use have to be certified against any specific standard? If so you'll be limited in your choices I think.

If you want the design IP to be portable (by portable, I mean to different hardware platforms) you might consider using more generic development boards or crossover products like the NB3000, which is both a development and a deployment board.

In the interests of objectivity and disclosure, I do work for Altium, but I think the suggestion is a legitimate answer to the discussion thread.

Regards,
Ben.