Development of a PXI Express Peripheral Module and Data Transfer Platform

Magritek, a company who specialise in NMR and MRI devices, required a new backplane communication solution for transmission of data. Possible options were evaluated and it was decided to move to the PXI Express instrumentation standard. As a first step of moving to this system, an FPGA based PXI Express Peripheral Module was designed and constructed. In order to produce this device, details on PXI Express boards and the signals required were researched, and schematics produced. These were then passed onto the board designer who incorporated the design with other design work at Magritek to produce a PXI Express Peripheral Module for use as an NMR transceiver board. With the board designed, the FPGA was configured to provide PXI Express functionality. This was designed to allow PCI Express transfers at high data speeds using Direct Memory Access (DMA). The PXI Express Peripheral board was then tested and found to function correctly, providing Memory Write speeds of 228 MB/s and Memory Read speeds of 162 MB/s. Also, to provide a test system for this physical and FPGA design, backplanes were designed to test communication between PXI Express modules.