Virtex-5 development board

[promach]

May I know who have info/resources on this Virtex-5 development board ?

[Bassman59]

I don't think that's a development board.

The Finisar SFP modules are for Fibre Channel, so my guess is you have a PCIe board which presents a Fibre Channel interface to the world.

[Mario87]

Bassman59 appears to be right on the money. Quick google of the number on the end of the PCB brought up this...

https://www.ebay.com/i/283975763103?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=28

Looks like it's from a DELL PC, not a dev board. When you google "Dell C7PJG" from that listing you get a whole host of websites. Costs £110 from here https://harddiskdirect.com/c7pjg-dell-controllers-other.html

Lots of people seem to be asking if they can use this card for bitcoin mining on reddit and other forums also. It's not a dev board however.

[SiliconWizard]

Yep, well we can tell from the connectors that it's fiber stuff. And, at this price... it would be a nice bargain for a dev board. Although, the Virtex-5 is already old tech. (Note that I don't think it's supported in Vivado, so you'd need Xilinx ISE.)

That said, reverse-engineering it is probably possible. And, we can see a JTAG header.

[promach]

Although, the Virtex-5 is already old tech.

True, these Arria 10 or Stratix V boards might be better hardware choices.

[SiliconWizard]

That said, if you can reverse-engineer those Virtex-5 boards at least enough to make use of them, they can still be interesting to play with. Virtex-5 FPGAs are still pretty powerful stuff. The one on those boards is not the biggest Vritex-5 available though, of course.

If you only intend to use them as an "accelerator" of some kind, and only need the PCIe interface as far as IOs go, then it's probably rather straightforward. It's very likely the vendor used Xilinx PCIe IP for this, and thus probably used a documented pin-out for the IOs for PCIe. So there's possibly nothing much to reverse engineer if you don't need access to any other IO and just use Xilinx IP for PCIe.

There doesn't seem to be any external memory on those boards though, so if you need lots of memory, just forget about it. But if the internal block RAM is enough for your projects, then why not.

Certainly the Arria 10 boards are more powerful stuff and include DDR4 RAM. But of course, significantly more expensive. I also don't know if you can easily get ahold of the documentation.

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

True, these Arria 10 or Stratix V boards might be better hardware choices.

And there is also some Chinese store (Judging by the layout, it is the reincarnation of a shop from this topic) offering development boards with XC7K420T for only $170-190.

[promach]

What exactly could be done with the SFP+ ports ?  I understand that it is sort of electrical-to-optical converter ?

I found https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/boards_and_kits/xtp066.pdf , but it seems that it is more of a chipscope ILA to capture the optical signal ?

[asmi]

What exactly could be done with the SFP+ ports ?  I understand that it is sort of electrical-to-optical converter ?

No, it's just a connector (SFP stands for Small Form-factor Pluggable), where you can connect various SFP+ transceivers with line speeds of up to 16 Gbps. They could be optical, or DAC cable (Direct Attach Copper) or even regular RJ45 transceivers. Can be used for all kind of connections, from Ethernet, Fibre Channel to fully custom channels.

[asmi]

That said, if you can reverse-engineer those Virtex-5 boards at least enough to make use of them, they can still be interesting to play with. Virtex-5 FPGAs are still pretty powerful stuff. The one on those boards is not the biggest Vritex-5 available though, of course.

If you only intend to use them as an "accelerator" of some kind, and only need the PCIe interface as far as IOs go, then it's probably rather straightforward. It's very likely the vendor used Xilinx PCIe IP for this, and thus probably used a documented pin-out for the IOs for PCIe. So there's possibly nothing much to reverse engineer if you don't need access to any other IO and just use Xilinx IP for PCIe.

The question is if it's going to require purchasing a license. Virtex products typically do require paid license, though I don't know for sure if these old chips still do, or you can use them for free now.

[promach]

No, it's just a connector (SFP stands for Small Form-factor Pluggable), where you can connect various SFP+ transceivers with line speeds of up to 16 Gbps. They could be optical, or DAC cable (Direct Attach Copper) or even regular RJ45 transceivers. Can be used for all kind of connections, from Ethernet, Fibre Channel to fully custom channels.

@asmi  you mean there is no PHY chip between FPGA and the SFP connector to handle 16Gbps signal ?

[asmi]

@asmi  you mean there is no PHY chip between FPGA and the SFP connector to handle 16Gbps signal ?

Nope, it's directly connected to transceiver pins of FPGA. So before you use SFP+ transceiver (a module that plugs into SFP+ port), you will have to make sure transceiver inside FPGA can actually handle the speed of that SFP+ module. This pluggable module is a PHY, depending on the module it could be optical, or copper. But those are pretty dumb PHYs, they merely make sure whatever serial stream that comes in, makes it way out the other side. So you will need to implement some sort of protocol on top of that serial stream to actually transmit something useful, be it something standard like 10 GbE, Fibre Channel, or something custom like Aurora, or even your own protocol.