Let me introduce you to Opsero’s latest offering: FPGA Drive FMC, a new FPGA Mezzanine Card that allows you to connect an NVMe PCIe solid-state drive to your FPGA.
There’s got to be a better way. In the past, if you were developing an FPGA based product that needed a large amount of fast non-volatile storage, the best solution was to connect a SATA drive. Physical interfacing was pretty simple because all you needed was one gigabit transceiver.
[Read More]
Now that I think about it, I’ve been using my Xilinx Platform Cable USB II for 10 years now!!! That’s a terrific run in my opinion, I got it in a kit for the Virtex-5 ML505 board in 2006 and I would have kept using it if I didn’t start getting these strange error messages recently. So from a recommendation, I got myself a JTAG HS3 from Digilent and it is just ridiculously better.
[Read More]
Did you know that the Zynq Ultrascale+ has 4 built-in Gigabit Ethernet MACs (GEMs)? That makes it awesome for Ethernet applications which is why I’ve just developed and shared an example design for the Zynq Ultrascale+ ZCU102 Evaluation board, armed with an Ethernet FMC to break-out those handy GEMs. The ZCU102 board has two FMC connectors, both high-pin-count (HPC), so I’ve created one basic design with two sets of constraints to choose from, depending on which FMC connector you want to use.
[Read More]
Here’s a first look at the FMC version of the FPGA Drive product, featured with the Samsung VNAND 950 Pro SSD. The FMC version can carry M-keyed M.2 modules for PCI Express and is designed to support up to 4-lanes. It has a HPC FMC connector which can be used on a LPC FMC carrier for a single-lane connection to the SSD, or a HPC FMC carrier to exploit the maximum throughput of a 4-lane connection.
[Read More]
For those of you who were interested in running my recent tutorials about connecting a PCIe SSD to the Zynq (Zynq PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado and Connecting an SSD to an FPGA running PetaLinux) you’ll be happy to know that Avnet has released the PicoZed FMC Carrier Card V2, which is the platform on which those tutorials were based.
For more information about the new PicoZed carrier, check out their video - and keep an eye out at 1m:32s where the Ethernet FMC gets a mention!
[Read More]
This is the final part of a three part tutorial series on creating a PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado and connecting a PCIe NVMe solid-state drive to an FPGA.
Part 1: Microblaze PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Part 2: Zynq PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Part 3: Connecting an SSD to an FPGA running PetaLinux (this tutorial)
In this final part of the tutorial series, we’ll start by testing our hardware with a stand-alone application that will verify the status of the PCIe link and perform enumeration of the PCIe end-points.
[Read More]
With the first prototypes on the way, it’s time to take a closer look at what exactly FPGA Drive is and how it can help you to develop new disruptive technologies with FPGAs and SSDs. Here’s what you need to know in 3 points:
FPGA Drive enables you to connect a high-speed Solid State Drive (SSD) to an FPGA FPGA Drive delivers high-capacity, extreme-throughput non-volatile storage to FPGA development boards FPGA Drive connects a 4-lane PCI Express bus between your FPGA and SSD The 3D rendered image shows the following key features:
[Read More]
Almost a year ago I did a comparison of Zynq SoMs, or System-on-Modules, these handy little Zynq-based devices that speed up your product development by taking the risk out of your PCB design and often handing you a ton of working example code. Well there have been many more Zynq SoMs come onto the market since then, so another comparison is due, but today I just wanted to review one of them: ZynqBoard, the smallest Zynq SoM on the market today according to zynqboard.
[Read More]
Xilinx just released a video presenting the next-generation of All Programmable devices and dev environments. It’s a quick look at where technology is going and particularly where FPGAs are going to make their mark.
Of particular interest to me were the images of a Virtex Ultrascale PCI Express board at 2:45 in the video. This board appears to have both the PCIe gold-finger edge connector and a PCIe saddle-mount socket connector, so it could be used as either the PCIe end-point or the root complex - or maybe both at the same time.
[Read More]
Very excited to be showing off my new Samsung SSD 950 in the M.2 form factor. This tiny solid-state drive has a PCI Express Gen3 x 4-lane interface for a more direct connection to the CPU which enables a much higher throughput than a SATA interface. According to Samsung:
It outperforms SATA SSDs by over 4.5 times in sequential read and by over 2.5 times in sequential write, delivering the speeds of 2,500 MB/s and 1,500 MB/s respectively.
[Read More]
