We were asked to migrate the SPI slave interfaces of an existing FPGA design to PCIe interfaces, providing massively more bandwidth, while maintaining the internal FPGA Wishbone communication infrastructure and as much as possible of the embedded software controlling the SPI masters. To do this, we replaced the SPI slave interfaces with a multi-function PCIe endpoint with attached Wishbone masters, and mapped the new FPGA design to an Altera Cyclone V GX device.

On the embedded software side, the low-level SPI driver was replaced by a custom PCIe driver, emulating the same behavior. This development provided our customer with a smooth transition to the latest FPGA technology, and delivers the performance required for next-generation systems.

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