30 Aug
2010
30 Aug
'10
3:12 p.m.
On 8/30/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 8/30/10 1:09 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote:
> The more I read about FPGAs the more I think I should really get into this
> area.
I'm in the same boat - I have an older Spartan FPGA on an IOB6120, but
I've done little with it other than stare at the source with vague
comprehension.
I recommend picking up one of the Xilinx-based
Digilent boards.
They're inexpensive and very nice.
Before the Cray-1 replica post, I was already looking at the Diligent
boards because of the project that does arcade machine emulation on
them (the example I saw was with one of the line of Diligent Spartan
3E boards, running Asteroids or Pac-Man, etc).
Xilinx has a freely-downloadable
toolchain (WebPACK) that works very well. It even has "real" Linux
support nowadays.
Excellent. For me, Linux development support is 100% essential. I'm
not likely to bother to get started if I have to set up a new
environment just to play with toys (I'm already set for Arduino and
Makerbot hacking from my CentOS laptop).
The free stuff supports all but the very largest of
their FPGAs.
Can you be a little more specific? What counts as "the very largest"?
I am, in fact, a bit muddled about which Diligent board would be a
good buy. I see prices between $100 and $200 for boards with various
features, but besides just buying the most expensive board because "of
course" it will have the most extras (attached RAM amount, gate count,
etc), I'm not sure what to get to be able to take advantage of what
appears to be an active pool of Diligent-based projects (I've
encountered two just in the past 10 days).
I've seen gate counts like 100K, 250K, 500K, and I've seen model
numbers like the "Spartan 3E-1600" and am not quite sure what maps to
what. Could someone who owns a Diligent board provide any information
about variations from model to model and what features are "must
haves"?
Thanks,
-ethan