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I am creating a project that would require high speed data communication between PC and my little "black box", so I am looking for a microcontroller or FPGA OEM board (not a single chip to avoid creating the board myself) along thoose lines:

  1. Ethernet interface (10Mbit or more).
  2. a lots of I/O pins (preferably 60 or more)
  3. Ability to control the voltage level of the IO pins (1.8V or 3.3V) digitally (through code,not by some mechanical switch or something)

I don't care about the size of the board. As for the price I am looking for something less than 100Euro(~130dollars). I was wondering if someone on the community has any suggestions.

Thanks a lot,

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Dynamic reconfiguration of I/O voltages is a tricky requirement. Most FPGAs have configurable pins, but not dynamically reconfigurable -- you need to load a new configuration file into the device, and you may also need to vary the externally-supplied I/O power supply. Would this be acceptable in your application? It sounds like you're building some sort of test gear, like a logic analyzer or signal generator. – Dave Tweed May 1 at 10:58
Why Ethernet? USB is more conventional and usually less hassle for those sorts of datarates... – Martin Thompson May 1 at 12:14
Indeed, something like one of the Cypress USB fifo parts might be preferable - you can use its 8051 core to download the FPGA config file (accomplishing your I/O standard configuration) and perhaps control the actual power supplies to the I/O banks, then set up the USB fifos to stream data between the PC and the FPGA design. To do ethernet, you'd need much more device-side software, and you'd have a dilemma between ethernet to a processor (for reconfigurability, but a bottleneck to then get to the FPGA) vs direct to the FPGA (for speed, but harder reconfig). – Chris Stratton May 1 at 20:48
I understand the pros of using USB for data transfer. The only reason I want to use Ethernet is that I have used USB for data transfer only as virtual COM port, which has slow data transfer rate. It is my understanding that I have to create some sort of usb driver in the pc side in order to utilize the full speed that USB offers. Isn't this the case?. – hlvas May 9 at 14:48
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1 Answer

60+ IO pins pretty much means FPGA I think.

Controlling the IO voltage digitally will require extra circuitry - most FPGAs have the IO voltage "sent in" from outside, but I don't know of any which allow you to switch it on the fly. Most are jumpered, or 0 ohm resistor population options. It also needs the IO reconfiguring, which means a "reboot" of the FPGA.

And I'd find a board with USB on myself rather than Ethernet.

Something from here might suit you:

http://www.opalkelly.com/products/

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Thans Martin for your quick reply, – hlvas May 2 at 8:13
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