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CardBus Interface
The Pico E‐14 can run as a standalone product or be connected to a host using the CardBus connector. By default, the Pico E‐14 ships with firmware that is ready for use as a CardBus slave device, but it also supports bus mastering. That same firmware also provides the means to switch into standlone mode.1
CardBus is a 32‐bit interface with a maximum speed of 33 MHz. The Pico E‐14 hardware is designed to support standard PCMCIA as well as DMA mode. The CardBus standard specifies that all CardBus hosts be backward compatible with PCMCIA.
Since CardBus systems can only be 3.3V, no digital translating transceivers are required to connect with a host. This allows direct connection to the Virtex‐4 FPGA for reduced power consumption. With this design, it is easily possible to reverse the CardBus interface and use the Pico E‐14 as a host controller for other CardBus and PCMCIA cards.
Those who are interested in alternate interfaces should contact Pico Computing. The PCMCIA decoder source code and support is available.
PCMCIA Interface Resources:
CompactFlash Association | www.compactflash.org |
PCMCIA Website | www.pcmcia.org |
1For more information on standlone, reference the Standalone documentation located in the doc directory of where Pico Utility is installed.
E‐14 Hardware Reference Manual | www.picocomputing.com | Pico Computing, Inc. |
