Re: [oc] Some questions

["Dave Feustel" <dfeustel@mindspring.com>]

Check out http://www.nallatech.com.
You will find some extremely relevant
(albeit, not cheap) products at that website.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <volodya@mindspring.com>
To: <cores@opencores.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2001 11:20 AM
Subject: [oc] Some questions


> 
>  Hi all :)
> 
>  I have some silly questions.. Perhaps someone will be kind enough to
> answer them.
> 
>  First of all what I am trying to do: 
>  I want to have an analog data acquisition board that can capture at least
>  40MS/s and deliver it the main memory for further processing in real
>  time. There are plenty of 40MS/s boards available, but they either have 
>  slow interface (RS-XXX or parellel port), do not deliver real-time or
>  simply too expensive. The good news is that ADCs are cheap (from
>  Maxim,TI or National) and one can even get a reasonably priced evaluation
>  board. So the next step for me is to get the data from the board to the
>  RAM. Unfortunately the situation with digital input boards is similar..
> 
>  So here goes:
> 
>  * I have found this development board:
> 
> http://www.insight-electronics.com/solutions/kits/xilinx/spartan-iipci.html
> 
>    which has Spartan II chip on board. The good news (for me) is that
>    this board costs $145 - quite acceptable. The bad news it is the bare
>    board. With something called "Xilinx PCI core" and other nonsense (like
>    DOS drivers) the price is around $1000 - not what I want to spend.
> 
>      + would "PCI bridge" core be the right thing to use for PCI interface?
> 
>      + the board designs on opencores.org seem to use Xilinx Vertex FPGA,
>        maybe someone would comment on Vertex versus Spartan II, maybe 
>        I should get a different board.. (Unlike ISA, PCI seems too tough
>        for me to manufacture at home).
> 
>      + with this board there seems to be a bootstrapping problem:
>        without PCI core the board cannot be programmed by CPU, but the
>        PCI core needs to be downloaded to it first. It looks like the
>        right way to go is to use an EEPROM and seperate EEPROM programmer. 
>        Am I off here ?
>        
>   * And some general questions:
> 
>      + the FAQ mentions the lack of open source compiler/tools
> 
>          o Did this change since it was last updated ?
> 
>          o Are there any (working) tools/howto to program FPGAs ?
> 
>          o What is needed to work with FPGAs ?
> 
>          o Any references (to book or webpages) to help are greatly
>            appreciated (I've got Jamils bookmarks), in particular
>            are there any standard (good !) books on design of VHDL
>            compiler and other tools ?
>      
>          o are there any thumb rules for gate counts needed to implement
>                 * PCI core (Xilinx uses 10K)
>                 * SDRAM interface (???)
>                 * FFT (???)
>                 * digital I/O (I guess a few.. I am wrong ?)
> 
>          o is it silly to hope to program FPGAs by hand first ?
>            (ala machine code for cpus) or is there a better way.
> 
>  Responses are very appreciated :)
> 
>                      thanks !
> 
>                          Vladimir Dergachev
> 
>                          http://www.sourceforge.net/users/volodya
> 
> 
> 
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