Re: New PCI card developing

["Marco Serafini - QR s.r.l" <r&d@qrverona.it>]

Hi Kevin,


> I know that if a PCI card with Xilinx or Altera-based FPGAs have two bit
> streams, one for 3.3V PCI and one for 5V PCI, it can be a universal card,
> but the PCI card will need an external chip (I saw a company called
> Nallatech using a CPLD to do that.), and is Xilinx or Altera going to
> release the HDL code as a reference design for such a CPLD?
>
 To implement a fully-compliant solution for a universal card using Altera
device you need two configuration files for 3.3V and 5.0V PCI. You can use
an external voltage sensor device to detect the system voltage on power-up
and an Altera MAX device to select the proper configuration file based on
the detected system voltage. If you use a Flash memory to store both
configuration files, MAX device can control the configuration process.
Altera released a White Paper two years ago with a VHDL design file:
"Configuring PLDs with Flash Memory".
This free VHDL design shows you how to configure FPGAs with data stored in a
Flash memory and it is a good starting point to implement a compliant
solution for universal card, you need to modify the code a bit to support
the two data streams. Is it too sophisticated?

Best Regards,
Marco Serafini -QR s.r.l. Italy