On Dec 29, 2013, at 12:41 , Sytse van Slooten <sytse at sytse.net> wrote:
@Mark, Out of curiosity, why would you go for
something like Microblaze
instead of a hard arm core?
Cost and ease of hand assembly: The Zynq chips from Xilinx with hard ARM cores start at
$55 and are in BGA packages. Spartan 6 chips start at $11 and can be had in TQFP packages.
I'm not sure whether the free license versions of the Xilinx tools support Zynq or not
(I haven't looked into that). My current home project ideas have low performance
requirements, too, so that makes me gravitate towards cheaper parts.
I haven't really looked at the lower end of the Zynq line yet, though. We're using
the high end parts at work so my brain associates "Zynq" with "$3500 dev
board". Maybe a smaller Zynq part would be a good match for this Ethernet bus
interface?
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/