Forum Discussion
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
15 years agoHi Michael,
Thank you for the response. You raise some of the big issues we have been debating over the last few weeks. Our requirement at this stage is quite simple, yet complicated to achieve. We have a custom designed board which acts like a flatbed scanner. It produces 200 MBytes of data in 3 seconds say every ten minutes or so, and we need to transfer that 200 MB in real time to a Mac Mini or equivalent. The 200MB is generated at a constant rate over the three seconds. Our PCB has a Cyclone III on it, connected to a Marvell 88E1111 PHY and Halo GigE Connector. So we have the hardware in place to implement the transfer. At this stage there are no other systems on the network, so it's a point-to-point connection. The system can be set up at installation and then will not change, it does not need to be flexible like a normal scanner. The board will always be connected to the same computer etc. Rather than answer your questions, I might ask what you recommend. We do not need TCP/IP and all the complications and overheads associated with that. UDP made the most sense to us - I'm busy looking into this UDPOffLoadExample (have been sorting out Quartus 9.0 to run it). Do you have any recommendations or advice for us at this stage? I do have some FPGA VHDL programming experience, but it's quite limited and I'm trying to move up the learning curve as quickly as possible. We also do not have unlimited funds at this stage, but purchasing the NIOS and TSE cores at $500 each is possible for us. Thanks!