The PCIe Colorbar demo is intended to show video data transmitting capability between the Lattice Nexus FPGA and a host system. The application takes video frame data continuously from the FPGA and displays it in real time. The video frame being generated by the FPGA is in RGB16 format.
The demo shows the streaming performance of the Lattice PCI Express SERDES hardware and PCI Express Endpoint IP core. The FPGAs are built on the Nexus FPGA platform using low power 28 nm FD-SOI technology.
DMA Support - Displays a series of moving colorbar by streaming the image data using DMA transfers from the FPGA to the host system. Option provided by the Lattice PCIe soft IP to enable more efficient data transfer when endpoint is acting as initiator or master. This feature is only available when the AHB-Lite data interface is selected.
Image Resolution – Image data consisting of different colored bars is transferred from the FPGA to PC memory, where software then displays it on the screen. The bars are rotated after every 50 frames to get a visualization of the moving image. The resolution of the image that can be selected is 800 X 600, 1920x1080 and 3840x2160 and is displayed on the screen at a certain frame rate.
Application Software – Developed using a layered architecture: GUI application, Driver API, Device Drivers, and Device Hardware (FPGA Design).