Communication Link between FPGA and PC

Nowadays, PC has become the most common platform for everybody. You use PC to store your personal data, business statistics, financial documents, digital photos, songs, etc. You also use PC to communicate daily with your family and friends through emails and messengers. For that reason, I think it is fair to say that the communication link on an embedded system with PC becomes more critical now than ever. One common example, almost all of the every recent generation of cell-phones can be connected to PC through USB.

If you have a FPGA on an embedded system, you find that at times you want your embedded system to talk to the PC. Luckily, a lot of Intellectual Properties (IP) have been designed by great FPGA companies such as Xilinx and Altera to build the connection between the FPGA and PC. Therefore, if you want to save yourself hassle from designing your own IPs, you can just buy those needed IPs from the targeted FPGA companies. Of course, these IPs are not for free but big companies certainly afford to buy the licenses for these IPs.

I personally have the experience to design and implement the communication links between a FPGA and a PC. I have designed the IP (using verilog) in the FPGA to talk to the PC via Parallel Port, Serial Port and most recently, the popular USB port. It is an wonderful feeling when I successfully communicate with the PC USB port from low-speed (1.5Mbps) to full-speed (12Mbps) using only a Cyclone FPGA and later HIGH-SPEED (480Mbps) using a Cyclone FPGA with the help of a NET2272 chip! The most difficult part when getting started is to enumerate the USB successfully. If you are already able to create an IP that can enumerate the USB device successfully with a FPGA, you are almost half way through. It is not easy but it is certainly not as difficult as you may imagine.