Attila Kinali wrote:

The only thing i'm not sure about is, how the
pins of an FPGA react while programming, ie
whether they could lock up the PCI bus or something.

Great question. That could be a problem. I suspect the power to the chip if it's a PCI board will come from the dedicated 5V lines on the PCI bus. Maybe it's best to have the Host PC in a stopped state (the GRUB menu or something like that) so there is nothing on the PCI bus?

Perhaps the FPGA part has some sort of programming mode which changes
all the pins to input. That would sound smart to me.

The Spartan-3 data sheet has the below 3 pins defined. So, an external
powersupply for the card could be stubbed out I would think.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dedicated ground pin. The number of GND pins depends on the     GND
package used. All must be connected.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dedicated auxiliary power supply pin. The number of VCCAUX      VCCAUX
pins depends on the package used. All must be connected to
+2.5V.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dedicated internal core logic power supply pin. The number of   VCCINT
VCCINT pins depends on the package used. All must be
connected to +1.2V.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A good thing to do would be to find someone that has already made a PCI
development card for one of these FPGA's. I couldn't find one. Then, one
could copy the design and start doing the testing of the FPGA programming.

Jeff
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