Hallo all!
I've just decided to subscribe this forum to pose this important question:
Can this fpga be turned to an interface, to gift a SPI interface to a common
PC motherboard?
Many thx in advance.
Sadly no.
Cyclone 10 LP don't have any transreceivers (xcvr) and all IO in mini pcie connector is from 3v3 bank.
Usually cards thath support pcie start from 150 to 200 usd.
There are some mini pci-e cards with Xilinx Artix7 series with pcie support. Cost was about 220 usd in ebay.
Search with "Artix 7 FPGA development kit for laptop M.2 NGFF PCIe"
Board manufacturer https://picoevb.com/
Edit:
I think using USB maybe easier to create bridge to SPI. It maybe need own protocol or using uart with spi access commands.
I am afraid Limba was too fast in answering...
mini PCIe pinout allows for several alternate pinouts and one of those has USB on it. PC motherboards usually support both PCIe and USB modules (for example most GSM modem mini PCIe modules use USB, not PCIe) so you'll be absolutely fine fitting Vidor in a PC, provided you have a mini PCIe interface available and you remove headers.
once you have Vidor fitted you have a choice to implement your USB to SPI bridge in many ways. maybe the easiest is to just implement a serial console that gets commands and uses SAMD to drive SPI.
Yeah I know that there are also USB lines there but I'm not sure how pcie lines behave without proper termination.
If disabling clock request is enough and ensuring that we don't supply 3v3 to pcie then it's ok.
But in this case wrong configured pinconfs can cause damage to motherboard.
DarioPennisi:
I am afraid Limba was too fast in answering...mini PCIe pinout allows for several alternate pinouts and one of those has USB on it. PC motherboards usually support both PCIe and USB modules (for example most GSM modem mini PCIe modules use USB, not PCIe) so you'll be absolutely fine fitting Vidor in a PC, provided you have a mini PCIe interface available and you remove headers.
once you have Vidor fitted you have a choice to implement your USB to SPI bridge in many ways. maybe the easiest is to just implement a serial console that gets commands and uses SAMD to drive SPI.
This is interesting, but consider that i need to develop hard real time applications:
I'd like to apply this systems to CNC machines.
In this field the usb is good only for handwheels.
G.
If you want to use pcie then earlier mini pcie card is solution but if you need more IO then check these.
This is little bit more costly but have 0.1" connectors (2x 2x20 pin with 36 IO in each). Maybe little overkill to that application.
OpenVINO from terasic. About 500 usd
Other maybe Dragon-L (Spartan 6 XC6SLX25T) card from knjn and it cost about 300 usd (Xilinx ISE web pack)
These FPGA:s have hard PCIe IP block so PCIe IP license cost is already in chip price so there should be any problem to use it.