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GigaBee Ref Designs for Ethernet Connectivity

Started by fpgaengineer, January 29, 2012, 11:24:53 AM

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fpgaengineer

For a customer, I need to equip several machines with a data transport layer and think of adding a GIG-E port because of the expected bandwidth. To startup easy and quick, I need modules to plug into the machines in order to have both HW and SW and as less work as possible. What I would need in detail is a plugin module carrying RAM, FLASH and FPGA to replace an existing HW, adding a GIG-E-port and directly have a running application to transmit data. From the HW side, the GigaBee meets the REQs fine, unit price is not too important.

Now I searched the site for reference designs but am not sure, what is available:

So far I see, that the GigaBee Ref Designs only base on AXI?  I did not work with that so far, but am a bit familiar with XPS in order to say that I would like to stay with pure VHDL instead of adding a MCU core. The design is critical in terms of validation, so I will have to shun classical software as well as third party MACs and do a kind of "mini MAC" myself, if necessary. I do not need anything like data protection, DNS or DHCP on that layer- just an easy way to gut the data up. (finally 200Mbit-300Mbit). Because several groups of 4 machines each will have to "talk" to each other, I intend to use ONE bi-dir link only to a GIG-E switch and thus wire everything "star like" instead of having a mesh in between the machines. So Ethernet should be the best choice.

For the first step, it would be fine to have an easy working example on how to drive the PHY (it is a Marvel 88x ,.. I think?) in logical and physical meaning to have a basic raw ethernet connectivity. In a second step a protocol might be added as well as further handling of data security, CRC and machine management, responses and emergency handling.

Is there anything available like that to directly run on the the GigaBee module?

Of course I found some MAC and UDP projects in the internet, but they all appear oversized and are not related to a specific HW. I really would like to drop in both HW and SW as one working unit, as far as possible.



Thorsten Trenz

#1

fpgaengineer

#2
Hello, this is a good link - I did not find that so far.

I checked that out, and found the given *.exe to receive data at the PC does not operate but quits with an error.

Can anyone confirm, that this package operates?