I dropped out of hardware circa early 70's. What can experimenter/hobbyist do with *AFFORDABLE* FPGA's? [ Comparing to IMSAI (sp?), KIM, SYM, misc S100 systems etc ] I think I'm asking for a bunch of pointers to informative websites. My current interest is 'describing speech'. [ Given too much grief, will carry out threat to write FFT in COBOL ;]
Rip Van Winkle asks "What's with FPGAs" ?
Started by ●May 3, 2004
Reply by ●May 3, 20042004-05-03
Richard Owlett wrote:> I dropped out of hardware circa early 70's. > > What can experimenter/hobbyist do with *AFFORDABLE* FPGA's? > [ Comparing to IMSAI (sp?), KIM, SYM, misc S100 systems etc ] > > I think I'm asking for a bunch of pointers to informative websites. > > My current interest is 'describing speech'. > [ Given too much grief, will carry out threat to write FFT in COBOL ;] > > >See the post FPGA! With Xilinx Spartan IIE parts ($25 each in small quantity, check Digi-Key for the real story) you can build frequency counters, demodulators, simple video processing hardware, data acquisition engines, small processors that emulate a KIM or S100 system, etc. Xilinx and Altera both give away free tools, and if you dig a bit you can get development boards for under $200. With this and a little bit of ingenuity you can do more with an FPGA what you could do with a two-foot-square board with 7400 series logic, and when you're done you can do something entirely different. -- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
Reply by ●May 3, 20042004-05-03
Tim Wescott wrote:> Richard Owlett wrote: > >> I dropped out of hardware circa early 70's. >> >> What can experimenter/hobbyist do with *AFFORDABLE* FPGA's? >> [ Comparing to IMSAI (sp?), KIM, SYM, misc S100 systems etc ] >> >> I think I'm asking for a bunch of pointers to informative websites. >> >> My current interest is 'describing speech'. >> [ Given too much grief, will carry out threat to write FFT in COBOL ;] >> >> >> > > See the post FPGA! > > With Xilinx Spartan IIE parts ($25 each in small quantity, check > Digi-Key for the real story) you can build frequency counters, > demodulators, simple video processing hardware, data acquisition > engines, small processors that emulate a KIM or S100 system, etc. > > Xilinx and Altera both give away free tools, and if you dig a bit you > can get development boards for under $200. With this and a little bit > of ingenuity you can do more with an FPGA what you could do with a > two-foot-square board with 7400 series logic, and when you're done you > can do something entirely different.More like a twenty-foot-square board, don't ya think? -- ____________________________________ Christopher R. Carlen Principal Laser/Optical Technologist Sandia National Laboratories CA USA crcarle@sandia.gov
Reply by ●May 3, 20042004-05-03
Chris Carlen wrote:> Tim Wescott wrote: > >> Richard Owlett wrote: >> >>> I dropped out of hardware circa early 70's. >>> >>> What can experimenter/hobbyist do with *AFFORDABLE* FPGA's? >>> [ Comparing to IMSAI (sp?), KIM, SYM, misc S100 systems etc ] >>> >>> I think I'm asking for a bunch of pointers to informative websites. >>> >>> My current interest is 'describing speech'. >>> [ Given too much grief, will carry out threat to write FFT in COBOL ;] >>> >>> >>> >> >> See the post FPGA! >> >> With Xilinx Spartan IIE parts ($25 each in small quantity, check >> Digi-Key for the real story) you can build frequency counters, >> demodulators, simple video processing hardware, data acquisition >> engines, small processors that emulate a KIM or S100 system, etc. >> >> Xilinx and Altera both give away free tools, and if you dig a bit you >> can get development boards for under $200. With this and a little bit >> of ingenuity you can do more with an FPGA what you could do with a >> two-foot-square board with 7400 series logic, and when you're done you >> can do something entirely different. > > > > More like a twenty-foot-square board, don't ya think? > >I said "more", I didn't say how much more! -- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
Reply by ●May 4, 20042004-05-04
It depends on how clever you are with your design. There are lots of neat things you can do with small FPGAs. For example, as a demo and an example for my upcoming book, I used a Xilinx SpartanII-100 FPGA on a $125 Insight board (cost included the FPGA), a Burr Brown ADC eval board and a pair of PC speakers to make an all digital shortwave receiver. It works well enough to recieve BBC from Rhode Island with the antenna connected directly to the ADC board (no filtering other than the single pole 63 MHz filter on the ADC board). There is a block diagram and short description of that design on my website. You can also use the small cheap FPGAs for quite sophisticated NTSC video processing, again if you are clever about the implementation. A number of folks have designed small CPUs using FPGAs. Some of these occupy a small enough area to fit several of them in low cost FPGAs from both Xilinx and Altera. some of these significantly out perform some of the microcontrollers, including the venerable 8051. Speech is another area where you can do a heckuva lot of processing with a very small amount of resources because of the very low data rate relative to the potential clock rates in FPGAs (even the cheap FPGAs can be clocked at over 100 MHz). Richard Owlett wrote:> I dropped out of hardware circa early 70's. > > What can experimenter/hobbyist do with *AFFORDABLE* FPGA's? > [ Comparing to IMSAI (sp?), KIM, SYM, misc S100 systems etc ] > > I think I'm asking for a bunch of pointers to informative websites. > > My current interest is 'describing speech'. > [ Given too much grief, will carry out threat to write FFT in COBOL ;]-- --Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc. 401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email ray@andraka.com http://www.andraka.com "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Reply by ●May 4, 20042004-05-04
Tim Wescott wrote:> Richard Owlett wrote: > >> I dropped out of hardware circa early 70's. >> >> What can experimenter/hobbyist do with *AFFORDABLE* FPGA's? >> [ Comparing to IMSAI (sp?), KIM, SYM, misc S100 systems etc ] >> >> I think I'm asking for a bunch of pointers to informative websites. >> >> My current interest is 'describing speech'. >> [ Given too much grief, will carry out threat to write FFT in COBOL ;] >> >> >> > > See the post FPGA!Reading that thread sparked my question ;) [ The thread has since touched on more intriguing possibilities -- ie one manufacturer has multiple powerPC's one one FPGA with room left.]> > With Xilinx Spartan IIE parts ($25 each in small quantity, check > Digi-Key for the real story) you can build frequency counters, > demodulators, simple video processing hardware, data acquisition > engines, small processors that emulate a KIM or S100 system, etc.I was using KIM etc as price point not functionality point.> > Xilinx and Altera both give away free tools, and if you dig a bit you > can get development boards for under $200.What connectivity is available? The KIM had a HEX keypad for input, a 4 digit HEX display for output, and IIRC a serial port for ???? Following a similar philosophy I would want; 1. an USB port for connection to host system for programming FPGA 2. an USB for data input/output ( may be same as #1 ) 3. appropriate buffers to create parallel/serial I/O ports 4. onboard A/D and/or D/A would be nice 5. an independent USB/parallel/serial port IO would be nice Am I dreaming to want such a FPGA/board combo at an hobbyist/instructional price that could also do significant processing? Ray Andraka's response was also intriguing. I suspect I'm at the point of not knowing enough to ask the "right" questions. > With this and a little bit> of ingenuity you can do more with an FPGA what you could do with a > two-foot-square board with 7400 series logic, and when you're done you > can do something entirely different. >
Reply by ●May 4, 20042004-05-04
Richard Owlett wrote:> Tim Wescott wrote: >-- snip --> What connectivity is available? > > The KIM had a HEX keypad for input, a 4 digit HEX display for output, > and IIRC a serial port for ????The Avnet/Cilicon Xilinx evaluation board has an 8-position dip switch, a couple of pushbutton switches, 10 LED's and a logic to RS-232 converter. It's up to you to program the UART to go behind the RS-232. You're really thinking "computer" when you need to be thinking "logic". You can configure an FPGA to be a microcontroller, but you can also configure it to be a PCI to VME bridge (or PCI to S-100 if you feel like it), or a dedicated graphics controller, etc. Where an FPGA is really useful for DSP is when you have some task where you have just a bit of computation that you need to do on tons of data, and it has to be fast, and it can't consume as much power as a medium-sized sun. You see this sort of thing with some video processing tasks, software radios and the like.> > Following a similar philosophy I would want; > 1. an USB port for connection to host system for programming FPGAThey don't get programmed that way. You can buy a programming cable (basically parallel to JTAG converter) for $99 from Xilinx; Altera would be similar.> 2. an USB for data input/output ( may be same as #1 )Jeez you're greedy. The Avnet/Cilicon Xilinx board has an RS-232 converter on it, as long as you're willing to use some logic for the UART.> 3. appropriate buffers to create parallel/serial I/O portsAre you kidding? That's what every I/O pin of a Xilinx part is.> 4. onboard A/D and/or D/A would be niceNone of the boards that I know of have this, unless someone has a video prototyping board. The whole point of an FPGA is insane flexibility; why tie it down with a specific ADC? It's fairly easy to make a board that plugs into an eval board, though.> 5. an independent USB/parallel/serial port IO would be niceUSB, no. The rest -- how many do you want (see answer to 3).> > Am I dreaming to want such a FPGA/board combo at an > hobbyist/instructional price that could also do significant processing?Well, how does $250 for the board and the cable strike you?> > Ray Andraka's response was also intriguing. > > I suspect I'm at the point of not knowing enough to ask the "right" > questions. >Sounds like it. Study the Xilinx data sheets. Embedded Systems Programming magazine had a little thing on FPGA programming (written by an Altera app engineer). It's a bit breathy, but it's true as far as it goes. I really don't know if there's an "introduction to FPGA design" out there -- have you tried googling?> >-- snip -->>-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
Reply by ●May 4, 20042004-05-04
Altera's got a cute promotional board they call a Cubic Cyclonium. It is a board shaped like a cyclone (tornado) with an EP1C6 and a 21x8 LED array on one side and the rest of the components on the other side, embedded in a block of clear acrylic. The board has an 8Mbyte SDRAM, a VGA triple DAC, a USB transciever and programming logic on it. It is programmed via a usb cable, and has a VGA connector plus a few pins on a header. It comes programmed as a desk clock/calendar, and shows a rotating cube of dots on a VGA monitor. It is powered by the USB cable. It also has some game applications on the CDROM, including Tetris. The cool thing is you have full access to the FPGA and can program it to many other things. The FPGA on there is a quite capable FPGA with 5980 logic cells and 20 4K bit Ram blocks. With that much logic, there is quite a bit you can do with it. I don't know how available they are, but you might ask your Altera rep about getting one. It is a cool toy, one that I intend to play with as a get a little bit of time. Tim Wescott wrote:> 4. onboard A/D and/or D/A would be nice> > None of the boards that I know of have this, unless someone has a video > prototyping board. The whole point of an FPGA is insane flexibility; > why tie it down with a specific ADC?There are a number of boards with ADCs and DACs on them. The cyclonium board has a triple DAC. For more serious applications there are plenty of boards now with those, including boards/systems from Nallatech, Xilinx, Annapolis Microsystems, Altera and many others.> > 5. an independent USB/parallel/serial port IO would be niceThere are several boards with USB on them now, many used for programming. Typically, they have a USB chip on them that then connects to the FPGA and perhaps to some programming logic and flash as well.> USB, no. The rest -- how many do you want (see answer to 3). > > > Ray Andraka's response was also intriguing.Good! The point is, the sky is the limit. -- --Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc. 401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email ray@andraka.com http://www.andraka.com "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Reply by ●May 5, 20042004-05-05
In article <109g7scoo3deue4@corp.supernews.com>, Tim Wescott <tim@wescottnospamdesign.com> wrote:>Richard Owlett wrote: >> Following a similar philosophy I would want; >> 1. an USB port for connection to host system for programming FPGA > >They don't get programmed that way. You can buy a programming cable >(basically parallel to JTAG converter) for $99 from Xilinx; Altera would >be similar.Useless because most typical PC's these days do not include parallel (or even serial) ports, student laptops in particular. I suppose a USB to parallel converted might work. Anyone make a direct USB to JTAG port for FPGA programming? How about FPGA development tools which run under Mac OS X or linux? IMHO. YMMV. -- Ron Nicholson rhn AT nicholson DOT com http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/ #include <canonical.disclaimer> // only my own opinions, etc.
Reply by ●May 5, 20042004-05-05
