FPGA Makes Industrial PCI Card Highly Flexible

Enlisting a 400k-gate Xilinx FPGA for all logic, the Mesa 5I23 general-purpose programmable industrial I/O card for the PCI bus can be considered an anything I/O card. Users can download the FPGA configuration from the PCI bus side, allowing creation of almost any kind of special I/O functions. Three 50-pin connectors with I/O-module, rack-compatible pin-outs and interleaved grounds each provide 24 I/O bits, for a total of 72 programmable I/O bits. Every bit tolerates 5V and can sink 12 mA. Pull-up resistors on every bit allow each to be connected directly to opto-isolators and contacts, etc. Bus master and DMA capability deliver fast PCI transfer rates while a 48-MHz crystal oscillator provides a reference clock that can be multiplied by the FPGA’s DLLs for faster clocks speeds. Several pre-made functions are provided including a 12-axis host-based servo motor controller, 24-channel quadrature counter, many versions of the SoftDMC motion controller including four- and eight-axis versions for step motors, brush-type servo motors, and BLDC servo motors, a 72-bit parallel I/O port, and a 12-channel, 32-bit timer-counter card capable of running at 100 MHz. Price is $153 each in volume. MESA ELECTRONICS, Richmond, CA. (510) 223-9272.