PCIe on a Cyclone II?

Question

I'm looking at building a mini-PCIe card containing an FPGA, and the Cyclone II caught my eye on the PCIe Integrators List (it's the first link on Google for those terms; I can't link to it because I don't have enough posts yet). That specifically mentions the Cyclone II as a component supporting PCIe 1.0a.

Does anyone know anything about this? Can I actually connect a Cyclone II to PCIe without any extra translation in between?

More explanation:

The aim is to get a lot of FPGA processing power on a mini-PCIe card for computer vision work. Normally I'd just use a Cyclone IV GX (which definitely does support PCIe), but they're all BGA. Since I'm designing and building this board myself, I can't use BGA chips.

I've checked all the other big FPGA companies too, and the story is always the same: no PCIe on anything that can be soldered by hand.

I've looked at PCIe serializer/deserializer chips, but they're all BGA too. The best I can find in a QFP package is the TI XIO2001 PCIe-to-PCI bridge chip (which means I waste 32+ pins on the FPGA for PCI and I lose almost half the available bandwidth). Alternatively I can use the USB2.0 connection included with mini-PCIe (going through a USB2.0 high-speed microcontroller to the FPGA) but that reduces bandwidth to even less than PCI.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

altera_forum · Answer

Hi,

if you want to use the Cyclone II you have to use a physical layer transceiver for PCIe. But the XIO1100 is a BGA to! You can find something about that here.

http://www.altera.com/products/devices/cyclone2/features/protocols/cy2-protocols.html?gsa_pos=2&wt.oss_r=1&wt.oss=cyclone%202%20pcie#pci_express

altera_forum · Answer

Right, thanks for that. Looks like the Cyclone II still isn't going to work for me then.  I've thought about getting the XIO1100 and attempting to solder that with a heat gun (there are a few guides around on soldering BGA at home) - but it's a big risk to take.  I have just found that the XIO2001 can manage 266MB/s throughput (32-bit, 66MHz PCI) so I won't actually lose any bandwidth compared to PCIe. It's still going to take up a lot of the PCB space and a lot of I/O pins on the FPGA, but it's a bit closer to what I was after.

altera_forum · Answer

Hi again,

if you think about soldering with a heat gun (not easy) maybe the EP4CGX15 in the N148 case is an option for you.

http://www.altera.com/literature/ds/dspkg.pdf

But take care, this FPGA is not so big!

altera_forum · Answer

Thanks again for the reply.  Soldering BGA with a heat gun is a "last resort" option for me. I'll do that if there's simply no other way to get an FPGA connected to PCIe, but I'd prefer to avoid it. Doing that would probably require me to buy several FPGAs and PCBs (because I'll destroy some while trying to solder them) and it'd be hard to test just how good the connection is once it's done.

altera_forum · Answer

In this point I can only agree with you  ;)

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PCIe on a Cyclone II?

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