Moin, I just stumbled over a company that builds PCI and PCI-E interface and bridge chips: http://www.plxtech.com/
What makes them interesting is, that they seem to provide also chips at very low volume. The online stores they promote have prices between 20USD (PCI-E bridge) and 30 to 37USD (PCI interface) for single chips. I don't know how much the lattice costs, but i'd say that these prices make them worth to have a look at them even if they are a bit more expensive than the lattice as we would save the whole issue of building our own PCI interface and trying to get standards conform. The advantages for us would be: * Simpler design of the PCI interface (ie we don't have to do it at all) * Thus faster development of OGD * Sandards compliance is nearly garanteed * Upgrade options to 64bit PCI-X and to PCI-E are available The disadvantages are: * The interface they provide might not fit our needs * We might loose flexibility because we do not design the PCI interface ourselves * The chips might get unavailable if the company goes down (Though they seem to have new chips in their pipeline which makes it unlikely) * The cost per part might increase * PCI-X clocks higher than 66MHz are not supported (though i don't think that's a big disadvantage) * The design of the OGD board might be already too advanced to change the PCI interface now The documentation seemed to be quite complete, but i had only a short look into it due to limited time. As PLX requires registration to download most of their documents and i know that quite a few of you don't like that, i've downloaded a few that seemed relevant to us and put them online: http://attila.kinali.ch/ogp/plx/ Greetings Attila Kinali -- wer soviel schoggi isst, kann sowieso nicht dumm sein ;-) -- Sandra _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
