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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
 Posted - Apr 29 2010 : 11:19:43 PM
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Hi,
I have an interest in FPGAs and I would like your recommendation on a Development board for the advanced hobbyist/university student. No need to look for me just let me know which one you recommend if you work with or have worked with FPGAs before.
Thanks.  |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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Brian
Apprentice
USA
106 Posts |
Posted - May 20 2010 : 8:45:17 PM
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| My friend has one of the Xilinx Spartan lineup. Unfortunately I do not know much about it other than the fact that he says it's pretty good ;) IIRC it has ethernet and a video ouput port among several other features. |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - May 20 2010 : 11:10:07 PM
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Thanks for your input.
The Xilinx "Spartan" is just a family of FPGAs, the name doesn't imply a Dev Kit. However I do see alot of Dev Kits using the Spartans.
I just wonder if we will move to FPGA based programing in the future for all intensive computational work, instead of writing programs all in a sequential manner like in C code, we can design hardware (in a sense) and program that hardware layout into an FPGA. This will greatly increase computational speed and efficiency and won't require very high clock speeds. Keep the C, Java, BASIC and all of that but have integrated PLDs mainstream so that every computer has some amount of programable logic.
You can already find this in PCI card form, but it would be nice if every computer CPU/Motherboard had lots of PLDs inside it to increase speed of any programs that could take advantage of it. Like video processing, games, sound processing, image processing and any task that requires dull and repeditive computations. It may take many CPU cycles to do a single iteration of a process on a CPU, but only a few clocks on an FPGA softwired for the task. More hardware and more complexity but I like the idea. We shouldn't have to wait for computers. |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - Jul 29 2010 : 10:30:58 PM
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Hey Wasssup,
I have had a lot of luck with Digilents stuff. I helped a fellow TA integrate them into a curriculum while in college. The Basys is like $60 for a Spartan with all sorts of stuff. Xylinx has some great tools that are completely free which helps.
http://digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10
Lattice has a deal going on to with one of their XP2 dev boards:
http://www.latticesemi.com/products/developmenthardware/developmentkits/xp2breviadevelopmentkit.cfm
Check into the Lattice toolchain before jumping on this one. I am not sure how long you can use their tools and what happens once the demo runs out (it may just be code space limited which is probably ok for this part)
Also check out opencores.org they have all sorts of things to to stick in your FPGA.
I have worked on several projects which have an embedded 16-32 bit processor in an FPGA with some custom modules on the wishbone bus. (i think lattice offers their core for free?) This is effective in the medical/military realm where cost is no object but in commercial markets custom ASICs are much cheaper. Part of the issue is that generating HDL to communicate with things over busses requires more silicon than having an embedded CPU in the FPGA...don't count out the C/assembly just yet.
Good Luck,
Brian |
Edited by - BEatonNo1 on Jul 29 2010 10:34:09 PM |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - Jul 29 2010 : 11:00:07 PM
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Hi BEatonNo1,
Lately I have been researching XMOS devices. They are not FPGAs but they do have a lot of potential. For my current self initiated project I am thinking of using a device from them that can do 1000MIPS. There are advantages this device has over FPGAs like there being no change in latencies when you modify the code since there is no re-routing performed inside the chip when you change the code. The XMOS device in question contains 2 cores and 8 hardware threads per core. Each core is capable of 500MIPS. They also have quad core versions too. You can find out more of what I am talking about at...
http://www.xmos.com/
One reason why I considered them is because they have the USB Audio Class 2.0 IP that you can acquire if you purchase a reference board from them. This will greatly shorten the time it takes to get my project working. However my Uni holidays are over and I am doing their work, not mine. Oh well I will just have to work on my project in what little spare time I have.
Thanks for your reply and the links too. |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
Edited by - wasssup1990 on Jul 29 2010 11:02:00 PM |
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - Jul 30 2010 : 12:03:28 AM
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| Interesting! Most micro manufacturers have USB examples to get you started. Microchip, ATMEL, TI, and Renesas do for sure. |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - Jul 30 2010 : 04:26:14 AM
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| I know they do, but XMOS have the "USB Audio Device Class 2.0" as I mentioned in my last post. My project needs this to play extremely high quality sound through multiple channels. The "USB Audio Device Class 1.0" is for lower bit rate stereo USB DACs. |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - Jul 30 2010 : 11:54:29 AM
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| This XMOS core is pretty interesting...their tools are free to!? Its like a RTOS implemented in hardware. Thanks for the link! |
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FPGA Dev boards.
