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DSNIC board

A PCI based DSNIC board[3] has been developed jointly between CERN and INFN[11]. The wide acceptance of the PCI bus standard allows the board to support many present and future processors.

  
Figure 1: The DSNIC board.

The board, see Figure 1, contains the AMCC 5933 PCI interface chip, two SGS Thompson C101 parallel to serial DS link interfaces[16], 256 Kbytes RAM, and the Altera FLEX 10K50 Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The spare pins of the FPGA are brought out to headers to allow hardware extensions, e.g., via a daughter board. The flexibility of the FPGA allows part of the communication functionality to be off-loaded to the board; this functionality is thus spread over the board's firmware and the controlling software, i.e., the driver, executed by the host CPU.



Marcel Boosten
Wed Mar 11 14:25:07 MET 1998