Design of low cost FPGA based PCI Bus Sniffer

This paper describes the design and implementation of the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus sniffer on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). PCI bus analyzer is a tool used by semiconductor industries to analyze the characteristics of PCI signals transmitted in the PCI bus. These equipments are expensive and not easily affordable by individual users. This paper presents a novel method of performing processor design using available freeware tools that facilitate learning hardware design at a low cost. The objective of this paper is to design, build and implement a low cost PCI Bus Sniffer. The design is implemented using FPGA and the Verilog Hardware Development Language (HDL). The target FPGA device used is SPARTAN II from Xilinx. This FPGA is embedded on a PCI Development Kit, which contains the necessary interface to probe PCI signals. This project has successfully shown that it is possible to design and implement a complex hardware design using free tools.