Number of I/O pins in Xilinx Virtex 5
This might not be a typical Stackoverflow question, but I wasn't sure where I could get this answered.


I flag this question to be moved to Electrical Engineering -> that's the right place :)

FPGAs are digital circuits, so normally there are only a few analog pins. For example a XC5VLX50T on a ML505 board is assembled in a FFG1136 package. That means the chip has 1136 pins. 480 of them are for digital I/O.

Resources:


Virtex-5 Family Guide -> overview, features and pin counts
Virtex-5 Packageing and Pinout -> pin descriptions


BUT

Reading out matrices from GPIO pins is the solution to your question! You should use a normal communication interface like: PCIe, Ethernet or UART to transfer data to and from FPGA.