  This work gives an overview of the PCI-Express board $\pi$LUP, focusing on
the motivation that led to its development, the technological choices adopted
and its performance. The $\pi$LUP card was designed by INFN and University of
Bologna as a readout interface candidate to be used after the Phase-II upgrade
of the Pixel Detector of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at LHC. The same team in
Bologna is also responsible for the design and commissioning of the ReadOut
Driver (ROD) board - currently implemented in all the four layers of the ATLAS
Pixel Detector (Insertable B-Layer, B-Layer, Layer-1 and Layer-2) - and
acquired in the past years expertise on the ATLAS readout chain and the
problematics arising in such experiments. Although the $\pi$LUP was designed to
fulfill a specific task, it is highly versatile and might fit a wide variety of
applications, some of which will be discussed in this work. Two
7$^{th}$-generation Xilinx FPGAs are mounted on the board: a Zynq-7 with an
embedded dual core ARM Processor and a Kintex-7. The latter features sixteen
12.5$\,$Gbps transceivers, allowing the board to interface easily to any other
electronic board, either electrically and/or optically, at the current
bandwidth of the experiments for LHC. Many data-transmission protocols have
been tested at different speeds, results will be discussed later in this work.
Two batches of $\pi$LUP boards have been fabricated and tested, two boards in
the first batch (version 1.0) and four boards in the second batch (version
1.1), encapsulating all the patches and improvements required by the first
version.
