I recently purchased the Hitech Global FMC USB3 board and I was able to interface the majority of the pins to an Intel FPGA board (Cyclone 10 GX dev kit to be exact). Mainly the PIPE pins and the other various control and status pins were all mapped nicely except for the ULPI pins so USB 2.0 is not supported. Since I have no interest in the USB 2.0 functionality, I didn’t really care too much that these pins did not map and were left floating. As you mentioned, only one of the two TI transceivers can be used. However, I later realized that four of the ULPI data pins are also used for strapping, and if left floating, the chip may behave differently than expected. In my case, pin N6, which is ULPI data bit 7, is left floating and I’m currently having the issue that I cannot receive or transmit data packets. In your experimentation with this FMC USB3 board, did you by any chance come across a similar situation?

By the way, all voltage levels on the Intel board match with this FMC USB3 board so I had mentioned everything maps out nicely except for the ULPI PHY.

Regards,
Luis

Regards!

Regards!

Regards!

Thanks for this post. I recently posted on your Xillybus forum about a USB 3.0 solution, and I’m glad I found this.

So, I have never had a good experience with HiTechGlobal. Many years back I purchased a Virtex-6 evaluation board, but needed it to be pretty top of the line so I got a -3 speed grade chip. The problem was, they used the exact same PCB board for the -3 grade chip that they did for the -1 and -2 grade. Unfortunately, the designers at Hitech didn’t realize that some of the pins are different in between speed grades, so some of my evaluation board pins were routed to literally unconnected FPGA pins. This was especially troublesome when the main clock pin on the board was routed to a normal data pin. Additionally, the PDF they sent along with the board was for the wrong FPGA type, so I had to figure out these myself. The board was $11k, and while they were initially responsive to my asking for help, they stopped responding to my emails after a while.

I have always had bad luck from them in the past, and was considering buying this module, but I don’t think they’ve changed much over the years. They just churn out new models as fast as possible with little quality control.

Xilinx rocketIO doesn’t support USB3 so the third port that is directly wired to the connector is useless on xilinx boards. I think it may have been added for use on Altera/Intel boards??

Eric

thanks for the wonderful and in-depth review! I wish I would have seen it earlier.

Best Regards,
rudi