The MESA 7I43 is a low cost, general purpose programmable I/O card that connects to the host computer via USB or PC parallel port. The 7I43 uses a 200K or 400K gate Xilinx FPGA for all logic, so it is truly an Anything I/O card. The FPGA is downloadable from the USB or Parallel port bus side, and also has the capability of local configuration storage in an on card EEPROM. Efficient switching regulators are used for FPGA core and 3.3V power, allowing the 7I43 to be USB bus powered. The 7I43 can also be powered by an external 5V source. A FTDI FT245R USB interface chip is used for the USB interface. Drivers are available for Windows and Linux. The drivers avaliable for the FT245R make the software interface a simple buffered byte stream. Parallel port bus interface uses EPP mode. A 50 MHz oscillator provides the FPGA clock. This clock can be multiplied or divided in the FPGA for other clock rates. The 7I43 has 48 I/O bits available on two 50 pin connectors. Both connectors use I/O module rack compatible pinouts. All I/O bits are 5V tolerant, and have series and parallel termination options (DCI). The I/O connectors are compatible with our 7 series daughter cards for isolated I/O, motion control and other applications. Configurations are provided for simple GPIO, Smart Motion control (SoftDMC), host based motion control (HostMot2), and a waveform generator.
