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Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

Can FPGA be directly interfaced with external storage drives?

Hi, I am wondering if its possible to implement a PCIe root IP in FPGA and use it to save streaming data into an off-chip high-speed storage device, such as SSD? Does PCIe controller handle co...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
15 years ago

Daixiwen,

Thanks for the response. Based on what I have found so far, I agree with your obesrvation. It seems Altera (or any other vendor's) PCIe IP typically support layer 0/1 functionality and anything higher needs to be custom designed. In EP mode this is not prohibitelvely complicated, but in root mode I think it is going to be a major project.

I wonder if this holds true for all other high-speed interfaces, such as SATA, Ethernet. Does anyone know of 3rd-party solutions out there which achieve such functionality?

I am surprised that given that FPGAs are nowadays so widely used for high-speed data acquisition and processing, there is not much support for high-speed storage solutions (except DDR controllers).