Design and implementation of synthesizable VHDL model for general PCMCIA IO cards controller

Abstract EN

The portable and nomadic computer market has driven the development of PCMCIA Cards to address the expansion needs for the user.

These cards provide a vast variety of hardware devices which are rugged, credit-card sized, lightweight, and power efficient.

These cards are easy to use, especially for the non-technical user.

Since the sockets are accessible from the outside of the system, the system does not have to be powered-off, opened, and rebooted to add or remove a device.

This dynamic insertion and removal feature inherently makes these devices power manageable and also allows devices to easily be shared among different computers.

This paper is concerned with type II PC cards, which mean I / O cards, therefore a design and implementation of synthesizable VHDL model for control system (Controller) of the PCMCIA I / O cards is presented.

The implementation of the control system (controller) has been done by using very high speed hardware descriptive language (VHDL) and its implementation on field programming gate array (FPGA) type Xilinx Spartan 2 (XC2S30-6 Pq208) by using synthesis and implement tools of ISE6.3 program.

The used of FPGA technology is optimal for this paper because it offers high reliability and flexibility in modifying and even developing the required design with a reduction in the required number of hardware components, also the non recurring engineering cost.

The timing behavior of the controller is be tested and verified to ensure that it meets the performance requirements by using simulation tools of Active-HDL program AND Daley report of ISE program, therefore examples of simulation results of read/write transfers for both an attribute memory and I / O devices are presented in this paper.