On 30/12/2013 09:04, Mark J. Blair wrote:
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?