Real-world FPGAs designs often require high rate transmission protocols such as PCIe, USB and SATA which rely on high speed transceivers for external communication. These protocols are used to interface with various devices such as graphics cards and storage devices, and many of our clients reach out to us specifically because they need the flexibility, high-throughput and low-latency characteristics of FPGAs.
In particular, for customers that deal with high data volumes (which is very common in video applications), implementing SATA to communicate and transfer data with e.g. an SSD hard drive is a must.
Since Antmicro believes in an open source, vendor neutral approach to FPGAs, today we will describe how to build a SATA-enabled system using a completely open source flow, including the hardware platform, FPGA IP as well as, perhaps most importantly, tooling which we have been developing as part our bigger effort within CHIPS Alliance.