[hpsdr] ATOM based micro board

[jeff millar]

I've been looking at PCI Express for SDR. The slot in the PC has some 
extra signals such as card presence detect and SMB bus but all that's 
really necessary is the Tx/Rx high speed serial pairs.
http://pinouts.ru/Slots/pci_express_pinout.shtml

Altera has just announced a low cost line of FPGA's, Arria 2 GX with 
built in PCI-Express serial interfaces implemented in hard silicon, no 
logic elements consumed in the core function.
http://www.altera.com/b/arria-ii-gx-transceiver.html

The PCI industry group has defined an external cable interface for PCI-e 
and some products exist, such as Cable adapter
http://www.innovative-dsp.com/products.php?product=PCI%20Express%20X1%20Cable%20Adapter

The advantages of PCI-e over USB or Ethernet, at least to me
- memory mapped programming model, easier access to control registers
- (compared to a packet protocol programming model)
- CPU's DMA engine can move data with little software
- Growth to 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x bandwidths
- Operating System interfaces designed for extremely high bandwidth

The Altera announcement changes the game significantly and enables low 
cost SDR on PCI-e.

jeff, wa1hco

Rob Frohne wrote:
> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> Frank's comments below prompt me to ask, what we could gain by 
> investigating how to overcome this straw problem? Would a Mercury like 
> card plugged into a PCI slot allow us to speed things up 
> significantly? Or does it need to be a PCI-Express slot? What can be 
> gained opening up the bottleneck of USB or firewire? Are there 
> applications that would benefit from this, or is the "straw" between 
> the computer and our brains such that fixing the USB/Firewire straw 
> doesn't buy us much? Should we be thinking of HPSDR 2?
>
> 73,
>
> Rob, KL7NA
>


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