I need to transfer video data to and from an FPGA device over PCI in a linux environment. I’m using a third party PCI master core on the FPGA. So far, I’ve implemented a simple DMA controller on the FPGA to transfer data from the FPGA to the CPU, using consecutive PCI write bursts.
Next, I need to transfer video data from the CPU to the FPGA. What is the best way to go about this?
Should I implement a module on the FPGA which performs a whole bunch of burst reads over PCI. Or is there a way to get the CPU to efficiently write data into the FPGA’s memory using PCI write bursts?
My bandwidth requirements are around 30 MB/s in both directions.
Thanks.
Sounds to me the FPGA should master both reads and writes. Otherwise you would hog the host CPU. That’s a classic task for a DMA (and you cannot guarantee a DMA exists on every host).