How much speed can we get from the XP10?  Enough to do any meaningful
timing captures?  According to the raw specs, we could theoretically
sample at 10x the PCI bus clock for a 33Mhz bus but the front end would have to be very carefully crafted to ensure the timing was fast enough.

You just made an interesting point.  We can get the XP10 to go that
fast... but can we get that data quickly enough from the XP10 into the
3S4000?  That might be a problem.

We could do some selectivity from the start... after all, signals that don't change are not "interesting" (as in, we can reconstruct them) to us, so why waste the memory bandwidth? There is no point in storing the non-changing signals in memory, since they will be flushed out later anyway. If we do some sort of "changelog" in the XP10, it will most likely make the tranfers faster. Since we are doing 32 bit PCI (right?) that is less than 128 signals, so we can easily clock over the changed signal + current state (as 8th bit)
in the connection between the two chips.
So, for example, if there is a 64 IO interface between Spartan and XP10, we could have 8 control signals (one clock, 5 bits to say number of transfers coming, and 2 whatever control) and 56 bits of data, split into 7 bytes, with 7 bits being the signal number and one bit being current state.
I don't know if this makes sense, just let me know if it doesn't ;-)

And make it DDR so 2.5 clock cycles can transfer every signal. With 10x bus speed, that should
be ample fast to capture stuff (4x overhead) - right?

If we want analog signals, it is basically the same idea but using, say 16 bits per signal with 7 bits
for identifying the signal and 9 bits of precision on the ADC.

So, how many pins of interconnect between Spartan and XP10?

nick
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