PCI interface with FPGA

Please provide more details, eg., do you have a board with an FPGA already on it, if so, what FPGA?

There are two types of PCI devices; masters and targets.

Targets are pretty simple and dumb. They can respond to reads and writes on the PCI bus, and their performance is pretty slow. However, if all you need to do is blink an LED, then a PCI target might work for you. I recall seeing a PCI Lite core mentioned in the Embedded IP and Peripherals guide.

http://www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_embedded_ip.pdf

If you need high performance over the PCI bus, then you need a PCI master interface. A PCI master interface can become the 'master' of the PCI bus, and it initiates PCI reads and writes. The master interface normally contains a DMA controller to perform read and write transactions.

If you are designing a board, then you need to determine the cost of the PCI master/target core (or the cost of writing one) relative to the use of something like a PLX Technologies PCI Master/Target interface chip, eg. the PCI9054 (or some of the newer devices).

The device drivers for PCI interfaces are pretty simple. I can point you to code examples for Linux if you need them.

Cheers,

Dave