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SoC Development Board

In the company I'm working for we're using DSPs and FPGAs to develop motion controllers. Since we're doing all the position, speed, torque and current control stuff in software, we're in need of powerful devices.

We're considering to get rid of the DSP and change to a SoC design in future. Therefore I would be interested if anyone can suggest an affordable SoC development board with an ambedded (digital signal) processor to evaluate the possiblities of SoC. I'm especially interested in Altera boards as we're already using them in our old designs. What FPGA should we choose? Cyclone, Cyclone II, Stratix? What embedded processor fits best to motion control needs? NIOS, ARM, PowerPC?

I'm looking forward to your suggestions. TIA.

Markus

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Markus Fuchs - http://www.yeahware.com
Reply to
Markus Fuchs
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Markus

Not Altera, as yet, but we have a range of Xilinx based boards with a high degree of flexibility and ability to add custom things. Have look here

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and see if anything there takes your interest. Commercial bit - If you don't find what you need we specialise in doing derivatives quickly too. The best example, in the public domain of what we do in fast turn, is our MINI-CAN board that had a design cycle, manufacture, 5 days of bench test and boards delivered to the customer in 18 calendar days.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2 with added Virtex-4 Solution.

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Reply to
John Adair

I think you are asking about moving the DSP into the FPGA - but we have no info on important details like:

** Code size and Data Size of present DSP ** Speed and Numeric ability of present DSP ** Does that DSP have FLASH or RAM ** Does this have instant-on, or Watchdog requirements ** Do you expect to execute code from FPGA BRAM, or Off Chip SRAM, or from Serial FLASH ? ** ADCs and other non digital peripherals included on present DSP ** Mix of core motion Sw, vs Human interface code ? ** PCB layer count you expect ** Design life time of the result

32 bit uC are now quite widespread and cheap, so a possible split of design resource would be to pull the DSP-motion code into the FPGA, (where it runs in BRAM) and move the Human and Interface code into a Flash uC

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Hi,

In article , snipped-for-privacy@replacewithcompanyname.co.uk says... Commercial bit - If you don't find what you need we

That's pretty impressive! Can you comment on what schematic capture/board layout progarms you're using?

John.

Reply to
John

An affordable and VERY compact solution is a Avnet Virtex-4FX12 MiniModule with a PowerPC, Giga LAN, 64MB DDR, 4MB flash and a price of

250$. There might be also enough logic for a simple DSP to preprocess data for a final processing in the PPC.

Cheers,

Guru

Markus Fuchs wrote:

Reply to
Guru

John

We use Protel/Altium Designer for schematics and PCB. We don't use the autorouter so I can't comment on it. Everything is hand routed which gives very good results.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

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Reply to
John Adair

Jim,

That's right.

Well, my aims are to get into SoC and replace MCUs/DSPs, where applicable, in the long term. I do not intend to replace a particular DSP in a particular existing design at the moment.

Thanks, Markus

--
Markus Fuchs - http://www.yeahware.com
Reply to
Markus Fuchs

This looks interesting. Looks like a really competitive price indeed.

Thanks, Markus

--
Markus Fuchs - http://www.yeahware.com
Reply to
Markus Fuchs

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