Re: [avr-gcc-list] [OT] Need For Speed (FPGA)

[Marvin Dickens]

On Friday 27 May 2005 07:22 pm, Martin Bammer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I can recommend SpartanII and Spartan3. These chips are quite cheap and
> powerful. A development system under Linux is available since a few months.
> It's free. I recommend to set kate as an external editor, because it's so
> much better to work with. At the moment I prefer SpartanII because they
> only need 2 different supply voltages. Spartan3 needs 3, which leads to a
> much more complex design. Because you are a beginner you should buy a
> starter kit. If you plan to create complex designs you REALLY should learn
> VHDL. VHDL programming is possible (and very comfortable) with the IDE from
> Xilinx.


I second Martins suggestion to learn VHDL. Regarding who's silicon to 
purchase, I mostly work with Altera. But, that's not to say Xilinx does not 
have good products - They do. FWIW, I seem to recall that a couple of AVR 
processors have been implimented in fpga's. I believe that I saw the projects 
at opencores.org. If my memory serves me correctly, at least one of them
claimed to have a 3X increase in speed as compared to the atmel offerings.
Even if this is not exactly accurate, I'd still bet you could massage out a 
lot of I/O pins using this route.

Hmm. This makes me want to load a chip and see how well it
plays with gcc. That would be a hoot :)

Regards

Marvin Dickens
Alpharetta, Georgia  USA