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Seeking FPGA and 8MB SDRAM in a PCMCIA Type I card

I'm looking to do some experiments with FPGAs, but I work solely on my Mac PowerBook laptop and I don't really have an easy place to keep an exposed FPGA development board lying around (I live on a sailboat). So it would be nice if I could find a simple FPGA experimentation kit. My PowerBook has a PCMCIA slot that I'm not using, so I thought that there must be some FPGA with at least 8MB of SDRAM packaged as a Type I PCMCIA card that I could use. I've searched high and low for what seems to me to be an obvious product to no avail. So, my question is, has anyone seen such a thing? If so, where can I find one?

thanks,

-greg

Reply to
Gregory Burd
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There is a list of FPGA board at

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(Thanks Philip.)

The only mention of PCMCIA is Annapolis Micro Systems

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You have another set of problems. Where are you going to get software that runs on a Mac?

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Reply to
Hal Murray

A sailboat would be a good place to learn HDL simulation. Here's one for Mac OS X:

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-- Mike Treseler

Reply to
Mike Treseler

Thanks Hal and Philip. That Annapolis Micro Wildcard-II

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seems like the beast I was looking for. Windows and Linux drivers. If the Linux drivers are open source it won't be hard for me to port it to Mac OS/X. The driver kit is fairly straight forward. With that I should be able to talk to it, poke around a bit. As for development software, gee I don't know. Anyone have suggestions? I'm really just starting out in hardware design. I've been in software land for 15 years professionally. I've been looking for a challenge and I saw the empty PCMCIA slot on my Mac and said, "Hey, I wonder what fun new interesting thing I could plug in there and learn about?" FPGAs have always been very interesting to me, so a few seconds later I launched my quest. I'm a fan of very high level languages (lisp, Erlang, etc) and yet I've done a lot of work at the C and assembly levels so I'm really interested to see how far I can get toward making a tool like the Wildcard-II available to the general user via say Io
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I'm very curious about async logic design and non-von Neumann computer architectures. I know, I know I'm in way over my head. But that's the fun part, right?

cheers, any additional help always appreciated.

-greg

Reply to
Gregory Burd

Thanks Mike. Its Winter here in Boston so I have to keep the brain moving so it won't freeze up. This looks like a good exercise to do just that.

-greg

Reply to
Gregory Burd

Might be interesting having a look at the Celoxica offering - C-ish program compiled to FPGA (I think it's C with fiddly bits to describe the parallelism in hardware design).

Reply to
Stephen Maudsley

...

All the stuff you mentioned is very high level. If you want to run something on your PCMCIA card, you need the low level tools, and I don't know of anything that runs on the MAC.

The low level place-and-route tools are roughly the assembler part of a compiler/assembler combination.

You might consider taking a 1-day intro class or find a friend who has the tools installed and will help you get started.

--
The suespammers.org mail server is located in California.  So are all my
other mailboxes.  Please do not send unsolicited bulk e-mail or unsolicited
commercial e-mail to my suespammers.org address or any of my other addresses.
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.
Reply to
Hal Murray

In the close-but-no-cigar category (type II), see also:

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Type II PCMCIA/Cardbus, XC3S400, 32 Mb SDRAM, $295 USD

Brian

Reply to
Brian Davis

Interesting thought. You're suggesting that I take the Io runtime and compile it using this tool? Interesting idea.

-greg

Reply to
Gregory Burd

Hal,

Good advise. Part of my goal is to somehow make it possible for those using Mac OS/X to do FPGA development. Seems like a rich untapped market.

-greg

Reply to
Gregory Burd

I think I mixed up the PCMCIA sizes. Type II is okay, Type III (double that of Type II) is not. I have exactly one Type II slot to use on the Mac PowerBook G4. So, I think this card is a good option and not too expensive either. Now, if only it had Mac OS/X driver and development software...

-greg

Reply to
Gregory Burd

Icarus Verilog works swimingly in Mac OS X. The 0.8 source compiles out of the box, or you can use Fink; although currently the version from Fink is a bit old. (Charles Lepple is looking for testers of a 0.8 Fink package, if you want to contribute there.)

As pointed out, you cannot quite do the back-end stuff, the map and par, on Mac OS X, but you can do all the rest.

--
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com           But I have promises to keep,
http://www.icarus.com         and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."
Reply to
Stephen Williams

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