FPGA Atmel ARM interfacing

[lahmitia]

Hi ,
I'm working on a personnal project,
I want to interface an FPGA (Virtex5 or Stratix4) to an Atmel ARM powered Uc (SAM9)
This FPGA would acquire 10 simultanous UART (TTL) signals from 10 Xbee modules
I want to send those signals to the ARM microcontroller using a Protocol.

What would be this interfacing protocol that i could use without having a bandwith problem ? then can you help me finding an evaluation board that i could use for that.

Thanks in advance.

Chris.

 

[elockpicker]

Hi,
You can incorporate a variety of protocols.It really depends on how the Uc is going to read the data...
Is the micro going access each Xbee individually ? are the data from Xbees going to be processed by the FPGA (and then be sent to ARM)?
Virtex 5 is a fast FPGA.
If your ARM is going to read the data from the Xbees individually (one Xbee at a time) then a simple way to accomplish this task is making the FPGA act as multiplxer which maps 10 Xbees into one UART interface. Xbees can be selected by a simple and tiny address bus.
This approach leaves you with the FPGA almost empty for other tasks...
The level conversion can be carried out by different ICs available...
I don't have much info about boards...

Good Luck