Connecting an Cyclone III FPGA to the OMAP35xx

Epic Vancouver said:

I have a customer that will be starting a design in January that will have an Altera Cyclone III FPGA interfacing with an OMAP35xx.

What would be the best way to interface these devices?

Probably the most logical interface to use between the OMAP35xx and the Altera FPGA is the OMAP35xx's GPMC interface.  This is an interface that is typically connected to non-volatile memory flash for booting, etc.  The OMAP35x EVM also has a SMSC Ethernet MAC/PHY device LAN9115 connected to the GPMC for 10/100 baseT connectivity.

Depending on the bandwidth needs, functionality desired, etc. other interfaces may be helpful as well.  It really depends on the system architecture, but interfaces like UARTs, Serial Ports (ie. MCBSP), etc could also be routed to the FPGA.

Epic Vancouver said:

As well, they were thinking of putting an ethernet MAC within the FPGA? Will there be WinCE6.0 drivers available for 10/100 ethernet within the OMAP3503 BSP?

The WinCE6.0 BSP has support for the SMSC LAN9115 Ethernet MAC/PHY device already.

I have seen customers sometimes  use our Video interfaces as high bandwidth parallel ports when hooking up to FPGAs.

Care to comment on OMAP3 in this context?

You could probably use the video interfaces, but the GPMC is going to be much easier, though slower. Using the video interfaces means that the FPGA must have a 'video like' implementation and the OMAP3 drivers have to be adjusted to handle the data, I have seen this done on Davinci products, though not on the OMAP3 yet. When I say 'video like' I mean a continuous flow of data in a format similar to video frames, unless it looks like video frames to the OMAP video ports it is possible that there could be unintended timing consequences, at least this was the case on a FPGA -> Davinci design I saw where if the FPGA stopped sending data for too long the capture port on the Davinci would go into a bad state leading to a system lock up. Of course the OMAP ports are slightly different, though since they were also designed for video they may have similar limitations.