Why would I use a high speed serial instrument over a regular RIO board?

[blackburnite]

What differentiates the high speed serial instruments from a regular FPGA RIO board?  Is it primarily that they allow you to implement and validate serial protocols with less development effort than the regular RIO boards or are there certain things which you physically cannot do with a regular RIO board that you can do with one of the high speed serial instruments do to the actual hardware?

[crossrulz]

From what I can tell, it is a data rate issue.  Last I looked, the regular RIO boards could only have 40MHz DIO.  The PXIe-6591R is talking about 12.5Gb/s data rate, which you would be hard pressed to do with a RIO board.

[Terry_ALE]

By regular RIO board do you mean R series?

Add to the high rate of 12.5 Gbps that there are multiple channels on these boards.

HSS boards also have plenty of DRAM.

[blackburnite]

Yes the R series. The FPGAs on some of the R series boards like the K325T on the 7822 have the 12.5 GB/s transceivers.  Is there a reason these cannot be utilized?

[Wild_man · Accepted solution]

The PXIe-7822 was designed with high density single-ended DIO while our high-speed serial devices were designed with high-speed serial in mind. This means that while the K325T has 12.5GB/s transceivers the PXIe-7822 does not expose them in favor of exposing a greater number of the available single-ended digital pins. Similarly, a high-speed serial card like the PXIe-6591 exposes several of the transceivers for serial connection to other devices and only few (20) single ended pins for general control and single-ended digital work.

Thanks,

[blackburnite]

I figured that was the case, just wanted to confirm, thanks.