PCI connector to beagleboard

Hi,

Is it possible to connect a PCI card to the beagleboard?

If it is possible, how to do it?

Any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Pete

Pete Kay <petedao@gmail.com> writes:

Is it possible to connect a PCI card to the beagleboard?

No, the OMAP3 chip does not have PCI interface.

You might be bale to use an FPGA to GPMC interface on OMAP3530, but the GPMC interface is not accessible on the Beagle. There i san MMC interface on the expansion connector. You might be able to use an FPGA to convert MMC to PCI, but it would be rather slow.

Gerald

One way is to use the PLX NET2282 USB peripheral controller, which can
convert a USB bit stream into PCI transactions. This chip is used in
USB to VGA controllers. It's not as fast as a direct connection, but
at least it's connectivity.

http://www.plxtech.com/products/net2000/net2282.asp

I thought there would be something like this out there, But I had not had the time to do a search for it. I think this would indeed be a great choice.

Gerald

If you’re streaming data across PCI (like VGA) this might work well. And since writes on PCI are posted, multiple writes could be batched in a single USB transfer, but for single reads, the latency would be a killer.

While SDIO is not terribly fast, at least it is relatively low-latency. The PCI/USB bridge might be workable depending on the application.

-Howard

John, thanks for sharing. This is a nice solution for interfacing to a PCI
device.

Regards,

Dear Gerald,

Can you please suggest how to convert MMC to PCI for OMAP. Is there
any documentation that you can share with me.

Regards
maimuna

I have no documentation to share. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been done by anyone. But, I believe it is doable.

Gerald