We have some product deployed that isn't working up to spec. I have one of the circuit boards in my lab, but I don't have the backplane system to plug it into for testing, nor do I have the bus host board that it communicates with. As I see it, however, all I have to do is supply logic for the 40 address/data and about 10 control and interrupt lines, and I can get some very basic bus traffic in and out of it. I plan on using my Spartan E 1600 dev board to supply the signals. I can use the serial port for terminal communication and control, but as the bus runs at 160Mbs, the serial port can't keep up. Well, it doesn't actually need to, but it would be cool if it could. And this brings me to my question.
Either Ethernet or USB could easily keep up the data rate, as long as they are full/fast implementations. The question then becomes, which would be the less painful to implement? I know there are integrated products for both, but I'm not up to speed on all of them. BTW, the board has Ethernet PHY, but that's inconsequential, because Xilinx only allows use of its EDK if I pony up 500 bucks, and I'd have to give up alot of Jack Daniels to come up with that kind of bread. It would have been nice though, because the I/O's for the Ethernet are already committed. Bummer.
Well, I'm open to anything that I can get up and running in about a week. Any longer than that, and I'll just stick with the serial port solution, and cache the data to be transmitted.