Hi all,
I'm thinking about a new board for JOP (or MB, NIOS). The board should be small and cheap (below the S3 Starter Kit). It should only contain the absolute necessary parts for a CPU design. Here is the suggested part list:
FPGA: Cyclone EP1C3 or Spartan XC3S200 256Kx16 15ns SRAM 2 MBit serial Flash 3.3V linear regulation switching regulator for the core voltage 20MHz clock to the PLL input
I've not yet decided about a X or A device.
A remaining question is about the form factor. I still think it makes sense to build the board as a module that can be integrated in a board with the peripherals (similar to the ACEX and Cyclone modules I've done). There are two 'standards' available:
1.) SimmStick, where the boards are designed as the 'old' PC SIMMs (see [1]).2.) The 'Basic Stamp' design is a board in the form of an old 40-pin (or less) DIL IC. An example (from a Java processor competitor): [2]
For a Java solution in an FPGA this board should beat the Systronix aJ100 Java processor modules (JStamp or JStick [3] - they have both form factors) in performance and price. One nice thing about the SimmStick is that there are plenty of I/O boards already available (see [4, 5, 6]). It seems a relative 'old' design, but it's a bus and I can build my first JOP cluster with those boards ;-)
What do you guys think about this idea? Does it make sense to build a another FPGA board?
[1]Martin
---------------------------------------------- JOP - a Java Processor core for FPGAs: