Re:Aller Artix-7 FPGA Board with M.2 Interface
by snops on Monday December 17, 2018 @07:33PM
(#18703591)
PCI-E is a good form factor for embedding an FPGA in a laptop, (especially as the spare but is still very difficult to debug issues with if you need high performance, you would not expect to actually get the full 2.5GT/S without some very hard work in the rest of your design.
A larger problem with this board, it doesn't have any onboard JTAG programmer, so if you put it into your laptop you will have to take it out every time to reprogram it! This is a shame, as Mini PCI-E mandates a USB 2.0 interface as well which would be useful for a programmer, while M.2 apparently only has USB optionally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2#Form_factors_and_keying
See the fun issues the XTRX project had getting good IO performance with an FPGA based SDR in the same form factor (PDF): https://xtrxsdr.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/xtrx-chasing-pci...
A larger problem with this board, it doesn't have any onboard JTAG programmer, so if you put it into your laptop you will have to take it out every time to reprogram it! This is a shame, as Mini PCI-E mandates a USB 2.0 interface as well which would be useful for a programmer, while M.2 apparently only has USB optionally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2#Form_factors_and_keying