On Dec 29, 2013, at 07:38 , Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
WHAT to use for the microprocessor and FPGA has been
the stumbling block for the 10 or so years of false
starts that I've had with microcontroller/FPGA projects. There never seems to be the
right way to glue the
two together.
I don't know whether you have particularly strong preferences for or against various
FPGA vendors. At work, we use Xilinx stuff heavily, including both bottom-end parts in the
sub-$30 range and top-end just-released OMFG-that's-expensive stuff. I tend to be
biased towards Xilinx FPGAs since they're what I have the most experience with.
I have a number of projects on my mind's back burner (i.e., the projects I think about
all of the time but never seem to begin in earnest) involving FPGAs and vintage hardware.
Lately I've been thinking in terms of using Spartan 6 family FPGAs, since the smaller
ones are pretty cheap and I have recent experience using them in my day job. I've also
thought a lot about what microcontrollers I might want to mate up with FPGAs (STM32F,
MSP430, board-level things like Rasberry Pi or Beaglebone Black), but most recently
I've started to gravitate towards embedding a synthesized processor into the FPGA
rather than wiring up an external one.
First I thought about using an open source 8051 core that I read about, but at the moment
I'm thinking of Xilinx's Microblaze core family instead. I did a quick experiment
and found that it took up around 25% of the smallest Spartan 6 in the configuration I
tried. Larger Microblaze configurations in other Xilinx families can even run Linux.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/