USB or Ethernet

Hi,

I have designed a board around a Stratix II and I am looking for a quicker and more efficient way to get data from the FPGA (registers read, writes, etc) than using I2C. I do not need to program the FPGA through USB or Ethernet, just for data transfers.

I have started to look at Ethernet and USB and I am trying to determine which interface is easier to implement and what kind of data transfer rates I can realistically expect. For USB, I have looked at chips such as CY7C68000 but really am not sure about the difficulty to implement on the FPGA side. I am quite new to USB and Ethernet and have never really written drivers for them. I would also like to interface these to the FPGA without using expensive IP.

I know USB is probably more difficult than Ethernet but the Powers to be would really like to see USB on my board. If I were to implement USB which hardware would you recommend to make it easier to interface to the Stratix II. What kind of data rates could I expect by using similar hardware to the USB blaster which I believe is USB to JTAG. I do not need high speed USB (480 Mbps), but something close to full speed would work (12 Mbps). Even something a little less would be okay. I have also seen such interfaces such as USB to I2C, but I was unsure if the data rates were any faster than regular I2C. I would definitely need something greater than 1 Mbps. I have already written verilog code for the I2C interface, so if I could acheive faster data rates than 1 Mbps by using USB to I2C, this would be awesome.

I am very new to this subject, so please excuse my ignorance.

I am really just flustered with the amount of interfaces out there and am really just looking for a starting direction in which I should look. I would really like to get this interface up and running fast, but really do not have much experience with USB and almost none with Ethernet. I would just like the easiest interface in which I could transmit/receive data to the Stratix II at rates faster than 1 Mbps.

Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Andrew