I am interested in doing some performance profiling and benchmarking using FPGA software. Right now, I am looking for a large open source FPGA to play around with. Unfortunately, I don't have a good sense of what constitutes a 'large' FPGA. Right now, I am working with a 35k gate USB controller that was suggested to me (I believe it's available through opencores.org). Does anyone have some other suggestions?
Thanks in advance, I would really appreciate some advice and guidance on the matter.
Well, "open source FPGA" is an abuse of language, a fpga is a hardware piece. The "cores" or "IP blocks" you program/load in them are open sources.
If you're just looking for a "big" thing. Look at gaisler leon 3. It's a complete SoC solution with differents cores in it, you can surely configure it to become pretty large. And it's also more "polyvalent" since you have cpu core, memory controller, pci , ...
I should have known that; thanks for the pointer. Nothing beats looking like a n00b...
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That might be interesting. My rationale for looking for something "big" is that I would like to have reasonably long run times. The USB2 controller I was working with took under a minute to synthesize. One of the problems is that I would like my workload to be as 'real world' as possible, and testing EDA tools with tiny chips isn't very interesting for those who really are using them for work.
I don't really know enough FPGA's to explain, but for an ASIC, I am pretty sure that the time to do an extraction for a 1mm^2 chip will be almost entirely uncorrelated to the time for an extraction of similar quality on a 370mm^2 behemoth. The real issue is trying to get a realistic workload and my feelings are that most of what I have seen at opencores.org are 'small'. Thanks for your help everyone I appreciate the comments!
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