Expose Serial transceivers for FPGA boards

[Intaris]

NI has released an exciting new product with the High-Speed Serial board which is essentially a Kintex 7 with GTX transeivers exposed.

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/212693

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/212695

Some applications we are working on would benefit greatly from having some way to expose the GTP / GTX / GTH transceivers ont he various NI FPGA boards to enable high speed serial transmissions on a wider product palette.  Even the Virtex 5 supprts up to 16 GTP transceivers.  Having even 8 of these available for Aurora communication would be a complete game changer as we could move over to optical links between individual devices.

In order to be able to make proper use of this, NI needs to offer GTX / GTH / GTP options for many of their boards.  Imagine the power which could be unlocked by itnerfacing 8x Zynq 7010 boards with a single Kintex 7, each Zynq performing some aspect of pre-processing (Analog control, switching, some aspects of control) before sending results back to the Kintex 7..... For those of us working in Scientific areas, the prospects of a system like this is truly mouth-watering.

[Chris.N]

 Hey Intaris,
Great post, I'm a huge fan of more transceivers on our FPGA products.  We've recently also come out with our controller for FlexRIO, that has two GTX transceivers exposed through SFP+:
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/213304
This could help you for the distributed applications you're mentioning - and we're already working with a lot of customers taking advantage of this architecture.  Here's an example of one of those applications from NIWeek this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHvSHOrB4Do
The same way transceivers are becoming more popular in indusrty, I think it's fair to say you would see this trend in our product lines as well.