[Coco] DE1 arrives :-)

[Stephen Adolph]

I agree with you FPGAs are flexible, that is the point of an FPGA.
But, there is a lot of extra engineering involved, and also extra
expense if one needed to make a variety of adapters, for a variety of
platforms.

It is much cheaper considering all the design and verification to
standardize on a platform.  But go ahead, retarget the design to
another FPGA and hardware platform!

Have you ever delivered a real product based on FPGA?  I have!  The
advice I am giving is from experience.  If someone is willing to do
all the work to bring up one platform and emulate a coco, ..... we
should not be looking to repeat all that effort.

So my 2 cents is - buy a DE1...it has momentum!

cheers, Steve





On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 8:44 PM, Stephen Adolph <twospruces at gmail.com> wrote:
>> power pins and ground pins are not flexible!
>>
>
> my point is that connecting X hardware to Y fpga board should not be
> difficult given that there are dozens of I/O pins on the FPGA boards
> and they are able to be used in a flexible manner from the programming
> side of things.   any fpga board should be able to communicate with
> any add on board given a physical adapter to connect the two and the
> correct programming.
>
>> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Stephen Adolph <twospruces at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> a couple of comments on this DE1 activity-
>>>>
>>>> 1)  Get your board before they discontinue...since for this to be
>>>> interesting, one might want to make expansion cards etc too, and we
>>>> have a defacto pinout.  They will make a new development board for the
>>>> next generation parts at some point.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The I/O pins are pretty flexible on all the FPGA boards I've seen.  I
>>> guess it would be wise to design any add on boards to use an adapter
>>> for connecting to the board, this way additional boards could be
>>> supported easily.  I don't imagine this will be a problem.
>>>
>>
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