Virtex-5 development board - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: promach
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2021, 04:09:20 am
content: May I know who have info/resources onthis Virtex-5 development board?

author: Bassman59
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2021, 09:10:19 pm
content: I don't think that's a development board.The Finisar SFP modules are for Fibre Channel, so my guess is you have a PCIe board which presents a Fibre Channel interface to the world.

author: Mario87
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2021, 10:17:27 am
content: Bassman59 appears to be right on the money. Quick google of the number on the end of the PCB brought up this...https://www.ebay.com/i/283975763103?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=28Looks like it's from a DELL PC, not a dev board. When you google "Dell C7PJG" from that listing you get a whole host of websites. Costs £110 from herehttps://harddiskdirect.com/c7pjg-dell-controllers-other.htmlLots of people seem to be asking if they can use this card for bitcoin mining on reddit and other forums also. It's not a dev board however.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2021, 05:33:20 pm
content: Yep, well we can tell from the connectors that it's fiber stuff. And, at this price... it would be a nice bargain for a dev board. Although, the Virtex-5 is already old tech. (Note that I don't think it's supported in Vivado, so you'd need Xilinx ISE.)That said, reverse-engineering it is probably possible. And, we can see a JTAG header.

author: promach
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2021, 11:37:19 am
content: QuoteTrue, theseArria 10orStratix Vboards might be better hardware choices.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2021, 05:12:55 pm
content: That said, if you can reverse-engineer those Virtex-5 boards at least enough to make use of them, they can still be interesting to play with. Virtex-5 FPGAs are still pretty powerful stuff. The one on those boards is not the biggest Vritex-5 available though, of course.If you only intend to use them as an "accelerator" of some kind, and only need the PCIe interface as far as IOs go, then it's probably rather straightforward. It's very likely the vendor used Xilinx PCIe IP for this, and thus probably used a documented pin-out for the IOs for PCIe. So there's possibly nothing much to reverse engineer if you don't need access to any other IO and just use Xilinx IP for PCIe.There doesn't seem to be any external memory on those boards though, so if you need lots of memory, just forget about it. But if the internal block RAM is enough for your projects, then why not.Certainly the Arria 10 boards are more powerful stuff and include DDR4 RAM. But of course, significantly more expensive. I also don't know if you can easily get ahold of the documentation.

author: Canis Dirus Leidy
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2021, 11:16:39 pm
content: Quote from: promach on July 04, 2021, 11:37:19 amAnd there is also some Chinese store (Judging by the layout, it is the reincarnation of ashop from this topic) offeringdevelopment boards with XC7K420Tfor only $170-190.

author: promach
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 10:05:29 am
content: What exactly could be done with the SFP+ ports ? I understand that it is sort of electrical-to-optical converter ?I foundhttps://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/boards_and_kits/xtp066.pdf, but it seems that it is more of a chipscope ILA to capture the optical signal ?

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2021, 04:00:53 am
content: Quote from: promach on July 10, 2021, 10:05:29 amNo, it's just a connector (SFP stands for Small Form-factor Pluggable), where you can connect various SFP+ transceivers with line speeds of up to 16 Gbps. They could be optical, or DAC cable (Direct Attach Copper) or even regular RJ45 transceivers. Can be used for all kind of connections, from Ethernet, Fibre Channel to fully custom channels.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2021, 04:04:42 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on July 04, 2021, 05:12:55 pmThe question is if it's going to require purchasing a license. Virtex products typically do require paid license, though I don't know for sure if these old chips still do, or you can use them for free now.

author: promach
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2021, 04:17:24 am
content: Quote@asmi you mean there is no PHY chip between FPGA and the SFP connector to handle 16Gbps signal ?

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2021, 04:50:10 am
content: Quote from: promach on July 11, 2021, 04:17:24 amNope, it's directly connected to transceiver pins of FPGA. So before you use SFP+ transceiver (a module that plugs into SFP+ port), you will have to make sure transceiver inside FPGA can actually handle the speed of that SFP+ module. This pluggable module is a PHY, depending on the module it could be optical, or copper. But those are pretty dumb PHYs, they merely make sure whatever serial stream that comes in, makes it way out the other side. So you will need to implement some sort of protocol on top of that serial stream to actually transmit something useful, be it something standard like 10 GbE, Fibre Channel, or something custom like Aurora, or even your own protocol.