Hello,
I have some unibus machines that always need some way to interface to
modern disks.
I always dream to make an universal board that could act as disk and/or
tape interface to a modern medium (scsi or cf/sd card), but also ram,
network, I/O, whatever...
It would be very nice to design a system based on fpga + cpu (arm), so you
can load linux on it and avoid the hassle of handling file systems for the
sd card, management and configuration, etc.
The low level part, the access to the bus, address decoding, and all the
parts that need real time reactions could be handled by the fpga.
The good part is that I could really help to design a system like this.
The bad is that it is expensive, specially because you have to use bga
components that need to be mounted by smd assembling machines.
But: there's always the possibility to choose a commercial development
board, and mount it as SOM over a larger board that would include only psu
and bus level translators.
This way could be cheaper and can be mounted by skilled hands...
If there's a number of people that would invest some money on it, to repay
tooling and minimum lot costs for the pcb and components, we could
definitely work together to make it.
Anybody interested?
Andrea