System flash data rates

A previous poster mentioned that configuring an LX150 from system flash takes about 35 seconds. That implies a data rate from the flash into the FPGA of about 120 Kbytes/sec. I have an XEM6310-LX45 and it takes 12 seconds to configure from flash, which is roughly the same data rate.

I’m more interested in the data rate using FlashRead, transferring data from the flash to the PC over the USB3.0 connection. My simple test (C#, 64-bit Windows 7) results in at most 23 Kbytes/sec. This is when I read multiple sectors. Reading pages at a time is even slower.

Is this performance to be expected? I think the Numonyx flash chip is quite a bit faster than that. Is the microcontroller bit-banging the flash SPI port in a less than optimal way? I would expect FPGA configuration and FlashRead to have about the same data rates. Or does the microcontroller get out of the way during FPGA configuration and hence that is faster? Is there any way to speed up FlashRead?

Thanks for any info.

Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the Cypress FX3.