Single-Board RIO with MGT exposed

[Intaris]

High speed serial links are becoming more and more prevalent in FPGA designs. NI now offers FPGA cards with these MGTs exposed.

It would be a huge advantage to be able to design / implement devices with embedded SB-RIOs which are capable of interfacing vis MGT.

AFAIK, none of the currently available SB-RIO have any MGT functionality exposed. For us (Analytical device manufacturer) this would be a real game-changer.

[Terry_ALE]

Really great idea! I don't work with SBRIO but this trend is true and nearly all new PXIe cards come with MGT interfacing. 

[RikkiTikkiTucker]

Hi all,

Thanks for the feedback!  I agree, this feature is interesting and could provide great value for certain applications.  Unfortunately, we do not have that capability on our current controllers (or the ones we are releasing this year). Our sbRIO controllers are targeted at customer applications where size and cost are often a leading concern, and we were unable to fit the additional power circuitry required to run the MGTs on the controller.  We are hopeful that we can address this feature in future generations of the controller.

Thanks!

[shansen1]

For a moment I thought the new sbRIO 9609 had this capability due to the PCIe capability on the RMC. However based on Tucker's comment I'm guessing the PCIe is routed to the cpu, not the FPGA.

I definitely second this idea. MGTs would be incredibly useful on the sbRIO platform due to its low pin-count. We've considered building products that use a number of sbRIOs distributed throughout the system, but it would require high-speed deterministic communication between each sbRIO. MGT support would allow us to build such a system while staying within the embedded form factor.