Low power consumption board with memory

Hi, I'm an italian student of Automation Engineering (..sorry for my academic english...). It's the first time that I post in this group. I would like to know if there is some fpga board (I've just used an Altera board for an exam of

Electronic Digital Systems) that has this requirements:

-low power consuption (for using with a solar panel), less than 100mA of current consumption at 3.3-1.2 V;

-a non-volatile memory (eeprom...) that contains the "programs" also when it's extinguished;

-a max cost of about 200 $.

I thank all of you that can answer to me.

Bye Duccio

Reply to
Duccio
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How many gates? A 200K Xilinx draws 80mA typical.

Usually an external chip.

Not a problem.

Reply to
linnix

Have a look at the Xilinx CoolRunner II range

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which seems to be more or less what you want.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
bill.sloman

I've used boards from

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for small jobs. Good support, USB loadable. Some have EEPROM. Available in both Xilinx and Altera varieties.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Burke

In CMOS devices a major determining factor of power consumption is clock speed, because switching consumers far, far more power than holding state. You want to keep the clock speed as low as you possibly can and still complete your application in the available time. Many microcontrollers designed for battery operation have features to slow or even stop the clock to most of the chip when computational demand is light, you may want to implement something similar in your FPGA design.

I know this is an FPGA newsgroup, but do you actually need an FPGA, or would a simple microcontroller accomplish your task?

Also you may want to consider if your instantaneous power budget can be higher than your time average power budget - if you have a battery in the system or potentially even a very large capacitor, you might be able to draw higher current for a few milliseconds, then "sleep" for a second drawing almost no power at all, for a low very low average power consumption.

Reply to
cs_posting

I mean I thought it was comp.arch.fpga, but now see that it isn't. All the more justification for asking if an FPGA is necessary, or if a little micro can do them job.

FPGA's are wonderful devices, and FPGA's with soft-core processors or paired with external processors give you all sorts of choices between hardware and software solutions - they are great for experiments. But for many products that don't need the unique advantages of dedicated hardware, they may not be the right choice. Consider you can just connect many small micros to a battery, download code and go - FPGAs tend to need a PCB, power supply sequencing, etc - because they are complicated devices and tend to find use only in applications that are either high end, already complicated, or where the point is to preserve options - in practice this means very expensive limited volume systems, prototypes, learning kits, and consumer products where subassemblies may change specification frequently, such as some flat panel TV's.

Reply to
cs_posting

Thanks to all for your help. The most important requirement of the board is that it must have a non-volatile memory so I can power-off it on the night (when there isn't thr sun that recharge the battery via solar panel), thus I'm oriented to the a CPLD board (as Altera MAX II, have everyone use this board?).

Bye

Reply to
Duccio

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