EP1C12 or XC3S400?

Hi,

I've seen this prototype board from Altium that seems to have a very good price:

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It comes in two flavours: one with an Altera Cyclone series EP1C12F324C8 and the other one with a Xilinx Spartand 3 XC3S400-4F456C. Both options have the same price of $99. Besides the FPGA, the both kits are exactly the same thing. My question is which one to select? Personally, I'd rather select the BIGGER one but I don't know which one it is. I know it is very difficult to compare the SIZE of two FPGAs with very different architectures. I used to compare the total number of the programmable flipflops in the FPGAs as my index. (it can be discussed if it is indeed a good index or not, but I think for syncronous and NORMAL designs this is much better than fuzzy things like system gates etc.). It seems that EP1C12 has much more FFs in the programable sections than XC3S400. So what do you think? Do you think EP1C12 is bigger than XC3S400? For designs that would be more of DSP type which one is better? And what for designs with a small processor inside? Well, one option is to buy both of them as you can easily cascade them an use them together in peace :)

Regards Arash

Reply to
Arash Salarian
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Hi Arash,

and

the

BIGGER

compare

The Cyclone 1C12

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has 12060 logic elements (4-LUT + FF + goo). In addition, we believe our LE is more efficient than Xilinx's logic element based on benchmarking results of how much we can pack into ours; I can't find the stats right now by memory tells me we believe there is a ~10% difference in packing density. The XC3S400 has 8,064 "logic cells", or in other words 7168 4-LUT + FF + different goo blocks (Xilinx inflates by 12.5% for random marketing reasons). So as you can see there is a large difference in logic capacity.

The XC3S400 has embedded multipliers, which the 1C12 does not, so if you require substantial multiplication then some of the logic difference will be consumed for multiplication. It also depends on how large the multipliers are that you need, what speed you need to run them, and what latency you require -- there are solutions involving "soft multipliers" that allow you to use M4K RAM blocks as multipliers if need be.

Speed may also be a consideration. In general, Cyclone is faster than Spartan-3; see

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for benchmarking results, and be sure to search this newsgroup for Steve (from Xilinx)'s responses to these claims. Note that the two devices offered on the dev board in question are both the slowest speed grade offered in the two respective families.

As far as processors go, both companies offer embedded soft processor solutions. Altera's Nios core was the first soft-processor solution available and has a large user base and mature, robust development tools. Nios II is the next-generation version of this core and offers improve capabilities and performance. Please see

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for more information.

You can try out both devices using the freely available software available from both companies. Our Quratus II Web Edition software

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n.html) fully supports Cyclone. If you have a design in mind, try it out on both and see which software and which chip you like.

Regards,

Paul Leventis Altera Corp.

Reply to
Paul Leventis (at home)

I looked at the Altium site and did not find the Spartan 3 modules you describe. Did you get this info directly from the sales people?

But keep in mind that there are other issues than just size or even the hardware. You should download the free versions of the software from each company and run them a bit to get a feel for them. You can do a

*lot* of work with FPGAs without ever using hardware. One significant difference is that the Altera sofware does not include an HDL simulator. It has a gate level simulator, so you can't run a test bench if I am not mistaken. You have to generate a waveform stimulus file instead which is much less flexible and portable.

The odd thing is that in the V2P data sheet they even *define* what a logic cell is "Logic Cell = (1) 4-input LUT + (1)FF + Carry Logic" and they *STILL* inflate the count by 12.5%. I wonder why they bother to define logic cells if they are not going to count them.

--
Rick "rickman" Collins

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Reply to
rickman

No, I found the information in the altium website. It seems they have just recently modified the evaluation package and now offer it with Spartan 3. Here is the online order form with the part number of the FPGAs on board.

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It seems that the original offer included BOTH Xilinx and Altera's FPGAs (in the form of daugther boards) but the new one comes separately.

Thanks. Yes that's the way to go. The point is that it is now round 3 years that I have not done any new designs using FPGAs but before that (in the Altera's 10K and 20K age!) I used to work actively with both Altera and Xilinx. So basically I know the toolsets quite well but I have never used Cyclone or Spartan and that's why I was wondering. Simulator in the Quartus or ISE is not that important for me. I have yet an older version (but a full version!) of ModelSim and I think even though it is old, yet it is much better of any offerings from Altera or Xilinx. At least I can use the full potentials of VHDL and also interface to C codes and much more.

Reply to
Arash Salarian

There are free options as well. I'm very happy with Icarus Verilog, which suits my workstyle much better than a slow GUI.

Tommy

Reply to
Tommy Thorn

Thanks for the info Paul. As I see the Xilinx datasheet says 896 CLB. Each CLB is four slices and each slice has 2 FF so 896*4*2=7168. Hmmmm, it seems my logic of only counting the embedded flipflops works :) Well It seems that the EP1C12 is indeed much BIGGER than XC3S400. Your point about the multipliers in the Spartan is also interesting. But the fact is that I need a board for prototyping and only God knows what I will try on it so I can't predict how many times I'll need a multiplier or not (sometimes I do DSP designs but not all DSP designs need full multipliers) ant thats why having more LEs (or FFs or CLBs or anything) is more important to me.

Just one more question. I remember that in the 10K series (yes, I'm an old guy!) the block RAM (EAB?) could also work in a fully asyncronous mode while the Xilinx devices at that time did not have this feature (and I used it a lot!). Is it the same for Cyclone and Spartan? Does Cyclone supports fully async block RAM while Spartan does not?

Regards Arash

Reply to
Arash Salarian

Well, I've never used Icarus before (maybe because I design most of the time in VHDL not in Verilog). But as I see Icarus does not have a waveform view (which can be very useful when dealing with complex timings) and also I won't call ModelSim a "slow GUI". As far as I know ModelSim is yet one of the fastest simulators in the industry and if you don't like GUI, you can use almost all of it from command line. In fact you need to do it as ModelSim's GUI is just a very thin layer of TCL over the command line tools so for any serious job you should write you own scripts. Also I use the code coverage tool and the debug mode of the ModelSim quite a lot and I don't know if Icarus has the same features or not (I could not find much info in the Icarus website).

Reply to
Arash Salarian

A word of caution here:

Altium or Protel as it was called is a PCB software company... Nextar is their FPGA development tools and both of these boards are designed to use Altium's software. As such support outside this simple parameter will be non existent.

Simon

and

the

BIGGER

compare

not,

fuzzy

Reply to
Simon Peacock

Arash Salarian wrote: : Well, I've never used Icarus before (maybe because I design most of the time : in VHDL not in Verilog). But as I see Icarus does not have a waveform view : (which can be very useful when dealing with complex timings) and also I Icarus is a simulator. For waveform viewing there are other options, like gtkview or dinotrace.

Bye

--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
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Reply to
Uwe Bonnes

Actually they are now gearing towards more integrated solutions and from Protel 99, they used to have a Schematics/PLD/Spice/PCB solution in one package so FPGAs are the next logical step. About the limitations of the evaluation board, as you can see from the specs, it supports a normal JTAG interface (using the PC's parallel port)that can be used with both Quartus and ISE so there is no problem with it if you don't want to use the Altium products for the development. So to me, it's just another FPGA prototype board as the others but with a bit better price/(density*features).

I myself, used to do my PCBs with Protel (and do the autorouting with SPECCTRA) so for me the new FPGA support in the Protel (or Nextar) is interesting and I may switch back to Protel in near future again. I don't think I'll use Protel/Nextar to actually design/simulate my FPGA based designs, but the changes in Schematics/PCB design programs to support FPGA based designs are attractive (like handling the pin-assignments based on the constrains of the PCB. Try to assign the pins manually for a 700+ pin BGA and see what I mean). Also they have a mixed signal simulator which can be sometimes useful if you need to mix analog/digital in the same board though I'm sure for pure digital simulation, my old trusty ModelSim is much better.

Reply to
Arash Salarian

guy!) the block RAM

that time did not

Spartan? Does Cyclone

No, this mode is not available in the Cyclone. It was available till the ACEXs. That change costed me some time to convert a project and I still would like to use asynch. block RAMs as larger LUTs.

Martin

---------------------------------------------- JOP - a Java Processor core for FPGAs:

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Reply to
Martin Schoeberl

I found the offer, but I can't find any info on what the board is... I don't use Flash and I am not willing to download an exe file. Don't they even have a data sheet???

As someone else pointed out, they are selling this board as a way to evaluate their software. So I am not clear about what I can do with it without buying their software. I also would like to know more about the IO capabilities. I sort of doubt that a Flash presentation will give me much technical info.

--
Rick "rickman" Collins

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Reply to
rickman

Well... can't you just buy the devel. board and use the free Webpack or Quartus later ? (when the 30 day trial is finished).

--
Sincerely,
Jung Ko
Reply to
Jung Ko

I belive there is a pretty good Spartan 3 dev board available for $99 that Xilinx supports (XC3S200 vs. XC3S400). I don't know of any that cheap from Altera.

--
Rick "rickman" Collins

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Reply to
rickman

Altera's evaluation board is $99 but it includes XC3S400 while the board from the Xilinx is XC3S200 (though, personally I think the cyclone version is better because the FPGA has more resources than XC3S400). You can the Altera's board with the free version of the development software from Xilinx or Altera so I think this is an interesting offer.

Btw, Rickman, you asked me about a direct link for the technical docs of the Altera's boards. I found it and that is it:

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The shematics for the Cyclone and Spartan version are:

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and the technical reference manual is:

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Reply to
Arash Salarian

ooops I mean the offer from Altium not Altera!

Reply to
Arash Salarian

There are some links to the board documentation here:

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Schematics are here, apologies if the links wrap around:
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Ripping text from the tech reference manual, correcting error in xtal frequency. The LiveDesign Evaluation Boards have the following features: . On-board FPGA Device . Dual 256Kx16 BIT FPGA configurable High Speed Static RAM . Audio System, Delta Sigma stereo DAC with user-adjustable corner frequency . Dual (stereo) miniature speakers with volume control . Audio Line Out and Headphone 2.5mm jacks with volume control . 6 Digit 7-Segment LED display . Fixed 50MHz clock . RS232 Serial Port . VGA Port . PS2 Mini DIN Mouse Port . PS2 Mini DIN PC Keyboard Port . 8-way DIP switch . LED array, 8 LEDS . Dual 20 pin I/O expansion headers with power supply selection links . User-defined TEST/RESET button

Cheers, Tim

-- Tim Simpson return address mostly is invalid

Reply to
tim simpson

I think you are confusing Altium with Altera. I have not been able to confirm that the Altium board is usable without the Altium software (demo version has a 30 day license only). There are JTAG ports on the board, but the use a connector for the PC parallel port. I also don't understand why there are *two* of them, soft and hard.

Yes, after nosing around on the web site I called Altium and they pointed me to the manual. But this still does not answer a lot of my questions. But it does show the user IO which is only 36 pins.

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Have you been able to verify if this board can be used with conventional tools? Does it have connectors for a Xilinx or other cable?

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Rick "rickman" Collins

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Reply to
rickman

Followup to: By author: snipped-for-privacy@bluepal.net In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga

Well, at least the schematics for the Altera version of the board has "Printer Port JTAG Interface - ByteBlaster compatible" in big letters on page 3.

-hpa

Reply to
H. Peter Anvin

I remember to read it somewhere in the Altium site that says that the boards WORK without Altium software. Also, by looking at the schematics you can see that in the Altera's version, they say the interface is compatible with ByteBlaster and for the Xilinx version it has been written to be compatible with ISE. I could not find any Cyclone EP1C12 or Spartan 3 XC3S400 prototype board with more than just an FPGA on it under (I mean, with some RAM, connectors, programmer interface, ...) under $200 and it seems that the Altium's offering has a great price. The only thing that I find missing in this board is the lack of a AD/DA on board. It would be very nice if they could fit a fast AD/DA in the same board and keep the same price ;)

Reply to
Arash Salarian

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