fpga4fun.com

Hi, my company is looking for a PCI-based board we can use as a security feature to plug into a standard PCI slot on a PC board for casino gaming. Unfortunately most I have found are very expensive and would be overkill.

I found the Dragon board and it looks promising as a development board since I can have secure (internal ROM) for a 8051 to write/read through the Xilinx for PCI. But I have questions, please:

1. So all boards include an 8051 with 8-bit parallel bus connected to the FPGA?
2. What type of 8051 is included, and how is downloading accomplished?
3. Can you recommended the Dragon board for this type of application? (Basically just receiving some bytes, processing, and transmitting back)

Note: I do not have PCI experience, only VHDL and microcontroller...but software people available to assist me.

Thanks! I went to the KNJN.com site but only one side of the board is visible.

Have a good day and God bless!

I've added pictures of both sides of the board.

The 8051 is an AN2131, which is basically a Cypress USB chip with an 8051 with 8KB internal RAM in it. The 8051 is blank and idle at power up (it has no ROM). It is programmed either through the PC (USB) or through an 8KB EEPROM on the Dragon board (the EEPROM loads the 8051 RAM at power up). The code executes from RAM

I'm afraid that wouldn't be secure, since the EEPROM is external and easy to read back.

Thanks for the reply.

Well sounds as if it would be fine for development purposes.

Later we'll just change the 8051 model used and won't be dependent upon external ROM; that way we can get the ball rolling and secure it later.

We're already now purchasing one to try.

Thanks for the support!