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Thoughts on interesting FPGA modules?

Former Member
Former Member

Hi There,

 

There are some applications that I have had a hard time finding easy to interface modules to an FPGA including LVDS modules and low cost camera modules.  This is where the LOGI Cam design concept came from.  Where we wanted to be able to easily interface between any number of camera modules and Pmod connectors.  The LOGI cam is able to adapt to many of the omnivision cameras and interface to the camera using the standard 8/10 bit parallel interface.

 

I have been interested in interfacing with some of the LVDS camera modules available to increase bandwidth and or to reduce pin count while communicating with a camera.  I have a prototype of a mt9V LVDS camera module that I will be working with.  It has the option to function using a parallel 8/10 bit data bus or using LVDS, which will be a great starter LVDS experience in a relatively low cost manner. 

 

Just wondering if you anyone else has been itching to interface from an FPGA with anything else that might be too expensive or not available?

 

Some thoughts are

- single channel LVDS ADC for low pin count high bandwidth application

- multi channel LVDS high speed ADC for DSP applications

- high resolution/speed LVDS camera modules

 

Any thoughts?

Parents

  • I'm still looking for a cheap FPGA that has PCI Express on chip.  I only need PCIe 1.1 (2.5 Gb/s full duplex), and even with that I don't need the bandwidth -- I just need the connectivity.  Xilinx Spartan-6 has PCIe, but the smallest chip is the LX25T.

     

    You can (or could) get a PCIe 1.1 transceiver from NXP, but it had a byte-wide interface which is 250 MB/s, pushing FPGA limits.  The on-chip PCIe typically have 32 bit interfaces, so you can work at 62.5 MHz which is a lot more manageable.  It's also a PITA to have to do CRC calculations using block RAM when they're so easy to do with dedicated hardware.

     

    This is a future application.  I currently have a very nice design for a customer that uses a small fraction of a 33MHz 32-bit PCI interface.  It works fine, but it's getting harder to find CPUs (SoCs) that have PCI.  So at some point I expect to need PCIe, assuming that customer continues that product line image  It's also something I'd like in my "bag of tricks".

     

    From what I can tell, the Spartan-6 LX has LVDS pins but they don't have clock/data recovery so it only works for standards like HDMI that have a separate clock.  I think you have to go with the LXT to get CDR, at least at high speed.  Is this impression correct?

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Hi,

     

    i tried clock recovery on LX9, and even if you can create a serial receiver with phase detector (won't do clock recovery, but if you have a local clock at bus frequency, you can at least recover the phase of incoming data) using XIlinx IP Core (SelectIO) it won't synthesize on LX9. I haven't tried to synthesize on LXT variant.

     

    Lattice has some nice (cheap) dev board with PCIe capabilities (ECP3), and a cool promotional video : Lattice ECP3 FPGA Jamz - YouTube

Reply
  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Hi,

     

    i tried clock recovery on LX9, and even if you can create a serial receiver with phase detector (won't do clock recovery, but if you have a local clock at bus frequency, you can at least recover the phase of incoming data) using XIlinx IP Core (SelectIO) it won't synthesize on LX9. I haven't tried to synthesize on LXT variant.

     

    Lattice has some nice (cheap) dev board with PCIe capabilities (ECP3), and a cool promotional video : Lattice ECP3 FPGA Jamz - YouTube

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