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Which FMC-Card for Ethernet?

Former Member

Hi,

i want to try FPGA for Ethernet, and I'm not sure if the plain ZedBoard is right for this.

As far as I understood the design, the GigE-Port on ZedBoard is connected to the Processor-Subsystem and not directly to the FPGA via GTX.

What do you think, does this make a big difference for the programming, or can I use that Ethernet-Port almost like a directly to the PL connected one?

Or might it be better to use some FMC-Card, e.g. the "1000 Base-T Ethernet Card", which is FMC LPC and thus should be compatible. (link: http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/1-2AJPAV.htm).

Thanks for your help! If you can recommend another solution or FMC-Card I'd love to hear about it too ;)

  • 0

    Depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

     

    There are two 10/100/1000 capable Ethernet MAC peripherals in the Processor Subsystem of the  Zynq device on the ZedBoard that that can be connected to a physical interface (or PHY) via GMII, RGMII or SGMII interfaces. There is one 10/100/1000 Ethernet PHY (Marvell 88E1518) on the ZedBoard that is connected, via an RGMII interface, to the Zynq device on one side and to magnetics and an RJ-45 connector on the other. So it is relatively easy to implement one 10/100/1000 Ethernet interface on the ZedBoard using these pieces and there are drivers available for this configuration as well.

     

    The "1000 Base-T Ethernet Card"  FMC card you reference implements two Ethernet PHY interfaces (Marvell 88E1111) with magnetics and RJ-45 connectors. It does not implement the Ethernet MAC function. You could connect the second Ethernet MAC in the Zynq device to one of the PHYs on this FMC card (or both MACs if you wanted to bypass the onboard PHY) or you could implement one or two Ethernet MACs in the Zynq Programmable Logic section and connect to the FMC card based PHYs. This would make sense if you wanted to implement the second Ethernet port or wanted to implement the MAC function in a manner not supported by the integrated MAC functions.

     

    -Gary

  • 0

    The ZedBoard is perfect for Ethernet applications just checkout the Ethernet FMC (http://ethernetfmc.com) which comes with example designs for the ZedBoard.