Nexys Video Artix-7 FPGA - Support for Analog Devices AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ

[Marius]

Hi, 

I have a query relating to the LPC FMC connector for the Nexys Video Artix-7 FPGA Trainer Board.

Will the FMC connector on this board support / be compatible with the Analog Devices "AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ" range of Wideband Software Defined Radio Boards?

As per my understanding these Analog Devices Evaluation Boards are compatible with the FMC connector on the Zedboard Zynq - 7000 ARM/FPGA SoC Development Board.

Is there a significant difference between the FMC connectors on these two Digilent Development Boards or is it safe to assume that the Nexys Video Artix-7 FPGA board will also support the Analog Devices evaluation boards?

 

[jpeyron]

Hi Marius,

The Nexys Video's FMC is a fully loaded LPC. If the Zedboard's FMC works then the Nexys Video's will as well. You should contact Analog Devices to ensure that the difference between the Artix 7 and the Arm core doesn't affect the compatibility with the AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ.

thank you,

Jon

[Marius]

Hi Jon, I will drop them an email but I believe they answer this in the user guides for these boards. They have various examples for running linux based applications but they also provide a section named 'no-os', where they provide sample VHDL and an SDK framework that (as far as I can assertain) will run from a Microblaze implementation on the FPGA. They indicate that these cards are compatible with various boards manufactured directly by Xilinx, like the Kintex KC705 (which does not contain an ARM processor either). In theory I believe this should work. The challenge will be to get decent data transfer rates back to the PC. The standard USB 2 simply will not cut it. My plan is to initially test the  AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ and then redesign my own that will include a Cypress Semiconductor USB 3 interface for fast transfer rates back to a PC running GNURadio. I need this board for developing multimedia applications and I am not willing to substitute it for the Zedboard.

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this.

Regards Marius

[jpeyron]

Hi Marius,

Unfortunately, I havent had a chance to worked with the AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ or GNURadio but this project sounds very interesting. Hopefully someone in the community will be able to give you some more insight on your project.

cheers,

Jon

[motaz]

@Marius
Hi Marius,

I am trying also to use an AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ with one of Digilent boards but I so far I didn't manage to find good resources to start with setup. I was wondering if you had any success with connect your analog device board into the Digilent one?

 

Thanks

-Motaz

[zygot]

9 minutes ago, motaz said:

I am trying also to use an AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ with one of Digilent boards

Analog devices has good FPGA support, though it uses makefiles and works best on a Linux HOST. See the documentation for details.

The best way to see if a vendor's FMC board works with a particular FPGA board is to see what platforms are targeted for the FMC mezzanine board. If ADI has a pre-built project for the AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ and The Nexys Video then it's a good bet that you can use these two boards together.

It's a bad idea to make assumptions about whether any particular FMC mezzanine board will work with any particular FPGA carrier board. You have to do the analysis fro yourself, unless of course, you are lucky enough to get a pre-built demo for a particular pair of boards. This depends highly on the type of IO and clocking pin assignments on both boards. If the mezzanine board device uses LVDS this can get pretty messy. Even if the FPGA board does a great job of implementing an LPC or HPC FMC interface it still might not be compatible with some FMC mezzanine boards. I know because I've run into such compatibility problems. The VITA FMC standard could be 'Plug and Play' but I've yet to see any FPGA development board vendor or mezzanine card vendor do what's necessary to make this happen. Even if they did, you'd end up with limitations on which board combinations work together. 

[motaz]

Thanks for your reply,
There are some projects availabe at Analog Device website, but unfortunately not for Nexys Video board or its Artix_7 FPGA. I have found I publication of someone using AD-FMCOMMS-EBZ3 with a custom board based of the Nexys Video, so the only think I can think of right now is to look over those provided projects ,especially their software part, and mimic it on the Nexys board