Interfacing Spartan-3 to PC

Hi,

I have the Xilinx spartan-3 development kit and I am tying to connect it
to PC troughs Ethernet connection. On the board there is a physical layer
transceiver (DP83847). My data is stored in a FIFO memory inside of the
FPGA. I would like to transmit it to the PC. Can someone suggest me how can
I do that?
I understood that I have to implement IP core on the FPGA and what
else...?

Thanks 
Vera

On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:39:00 -0500, vekos wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have the Xilinx spartan-3 development kit and I am tying to connect it
> to PC troughs Ethernet connection. On the board there is a physical
> layer transceiver (DP83847). My data is stored in a FIFO memory inside
> of the FPGA. I would like to transmit it to the PC. Can someone suggest
> me how can I do that?
> I understood that I have to implement IP core on the FPGA and what
> else...?

The "what else" is a lot.

You need to implement the IP on the FPGA, then you need to talk to it 
with a processor and software or with some sort of a state machine.  You 
have to implement a protocol stack for whatever protocol you're going to 
use.  Something like TCP/IP is very well known, you may be able to get a 
stack for the processor on the board, and your PC will support it (or the 
things you want to put 'on top' of it).  You could choose a port and 
write raw Ethernet packets, which takes a lot less software on the Xilinx 
side, but would probably require getting into the guts of some low-level 
Windows API (Windows programming -- ugh).

There's lots of work there.

I would start by seeing if Xilinx has a canned sample design, and attempt 
to springboard off of that.

-- 
http://www.wescottdesign.com