15 Nov
2011
15 Nov
'11
4:28 p.m.
On 15/11/11 2:45 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Atmel had two
families of FPGAs, the AT40K and the AT6000. They are both
tiny and limited by today's standards, but teh AT6000 (if I remember
correctly) did have its configuration bits fully documented and for a
while I considered using it in my projects for this reason.
I assume said chips are very hard to find now. That's the other problem I
find withFPGAs and their ilk -- they're discontinued and replaced very
freqeuntly. And then you have to updata your tools for the new device and
hope it really does behave identically. At least with plain old TTL I can
still get a 14 pin chip that behaves in much the same way as the
original 7400, albeit faster and with less power consumption
> There was a project to figure out the configuration bits for Virtex
> chips which was part of a larger project to build a PDP-10 with FPGAs. I
> don't think either was finished:
>
> http://neil.franklin.ch/Projects/VirtexTools/
>
> Here is a series of papers about more recent efforts to generate
> configuration bits without using the vendor tools:
>... Am I theonly person to feel it's ridiculous to
have reserach papers
re-discovering information that is already known ot some people
No, you're not the only one. The status quo is ridiculously inefficient.
Even worse were the threats mentioned earlier that the somebody will
'make trouble' if certain directions are pursued. There are words for
that kind of thing.
--T
(those
who work for the FPGA manufactuer). I feel that research should solve
genuine problems that nobody knows the answer too, not artificial ones to
whci hthe anser is known but 'we won't tell you'.
-tony