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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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9 years ago

DEO nano specifications

I am looking at using the DEO Nano Kit to output data through the GPIO port. I see that it has Gb Ethernet. I need to get data from PC through Ethernet port and output the data to GPIO pins.

Here are my specifications, can it do it?:

Receive data from the Gb Ethernet port at 12 MB/s.

Generate a clock pulse at 6 MHz.

At every pulse cycle, do the following:

Transpose one bite of data to 8 GPIO output pins.

Use the other byte to adjust the pulse width of a nibble from the first bit.

Repeat this for 400 cycles.

Set GPIO and clock output to all low.

Wait 25 cycles.

Repeat through 2 GB of data. Total time of operation is about 200s

I could get the data from the SD card.

Can it do both of these?

Thank you

3 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    Well the hardware is definitely there to support what you want. Gigabit ethernet, 70 GPIO using LVTTL for single ended operations, which can be configured to run in differential mode if you end up having signal integrity problems. The question is software. There are many ways you could do it. It doesn't sound too hard. You could run linux and write some user software and utilize sockets to get the data off the ethernet port. Then, you could feed a verilog module that actually drives the data out to the GPIO. Just some ideas.

    The same can be done with an SD card but instead of interfacing with sockets, you would read from a block device, the SD card itself, and that would just be regular file I/O at that point. I've never done it but I think it goes something like that.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    You must mean the 'DE0 NANO SOC' board as opposed to the 'DE0 NANO' board, correct?

    The SOC board is a newer design with a CycloneV SOC embedded-processor, whereas the older NANO is a CycloneIV pure-FPGA design.