Sydney-X1 FPGA Computer Challenges Commodore, Amiga and Apple

SYDNEY-X1 FPGA COMPUTER CHALLENGES COMMODORE, AMIGA AND APPLE

BurchED announces the release of the Sydney-X1 FPGA Computer for electronics hobbyists, educators and computer architecture researchers

SYDNEY, Australia, July 15, 2004 - BurchED, a provider of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development board solutions, today announced the availability of the new Sydney-X1 FPGA Computer. Integrating the high performance B5-X300 FPGA motherboard, the Sydney-X1 addresses electronics hobbyists' demand for a new and exciting platform for the design of small system-on-chip computers, custom or standard architecture CPUs, and arcade-style gaming machines.

The Sydney-X1 is a complete computer system based on FPGA technology, and is supplied with everything needed for a working system out-of-the-box, including keyboard, mouse, VGA extension cable, 5W speaker, 64MB compact flash card, power supply and FPGA programming cable. Design for the system is done using the free Xilinx WebPACKT design tools, and with VHDL or Verilog hardware description language code. System-on-chip designs can be created from mixes of code including cores available from the web, code from BurchED demo applications and code designed from scratch. The FPGA can be reprogrammed within a matter of seconds, so that different designs can be developed and shared amongst users.

The Challenge With the introduction of the Sydney-X1, BurchED claims to attempt to capture some of the spirit and fun of earlier frontier computing machines such as the Commodore 64, Amiga Color Personal Computer, and Apple IIe. The Sydney-X1 provides the accessibility and hardware control that was characteristic of those early machines, while providing an easy-to-use platform for today's electronics hobbyists.

About FPGA Computers FPGA computers are a new concept in electronics hobbyist computing. They offer the ability to explore the design of new computers and other system-on-chip hardware. The main difference between an FPGA computer and a traditional computer is that there is no fixed-silicon CPU at the heart of the machine. Instead, there is a programmable gate array device (the FPGA), which can directly implement a CPU, or multiple CPUs, and peripheral interfaces. CPUs may be custom designed or functionally identical to popular vendors' CPUs, such as Microchip PIC, Atmel AVR, Zilog, or Intel microcontrollers.

About BurchED Burch Electronic Designs (BurchED), founded in 1997, is a provider of great value Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development boards, for use by electronics hobbyists, design engineers and universities. Additional information about BurchED is available at

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