Mesa Electronics is offering the MESA 5I23, a general-purpose programmable industrial I/O card for the PCI bus. The 5I23 uses a 400K-gate Xilinx FPGA for all logic. The FPGA configuration is downloadable from the PCI bus side, allowing almost any kind of specialized I/O function to be created.
The 5I23 has three 50-pin connectors with I/O module rack-compatible pinouts and interleaved grounds. Each connector provides 24 I/O bits for a total of 72 programmable I/O bits. All I/O bits are 5V-tolerant and can sink 12 mA. Pull-up resistors are provided for all pins so they can be connected directly to opto-isolators, contacts etc. Bus master and DMA capability allow fast PCI transfer rates. A 48-MHz crystal oscillator provides a reference clock that can be multiplied by the FPGA’s DLLs to obtain higher clock rates.
Several predefined functions are provided, including a 12-axis host-based servo motor controller, a 24-channel quadrature counter, many versions of the SoftDMC motion controller including 4- and 8-axis versions for stepper motors, brush-type servo motors and BLDC servo motors, a simple 72-bit parallel I/O port, and a 12-channel, 32-bit timer/counter capable of running at 100 MHz.
VHDL source code is provided for all functions. Four-layer circuit card construction is used to minimize radiated EMI and provide optimum ground and power integrity.
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