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24 Counters on one board

Hello everyone,

I am a totally newbie with FPGA, I really need some help for our project.

We have 24 simple digital signals, and we want to build a FPGA-Board to take count of the pulses of each digital signal, so it runs just like 24 counters, and the results should be transfered to PC with a USB-Interface.

I have found pretty much information about FPGA, but I really don't know which is suitable for this job. Could someone give me some suggestions (e.g which type, which mark, the price and so on)? I very appreciate for any help.

Le P.S: What we need is a design-kit, because maybe we could program more functions on it in the future.

Reply to
Le.Wang
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Most any modern ram based (Xilinx or Altera, others) FPGA should handle 24 counters at frequencies up to 100 MHz or more.

I plugged some likely words into a search engine

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and quickly found this:

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I've never done business with this company. You might find something cheaper, larger, closer to home, easier to use, etc. Spending some time searching the web would be worthwhile.

--
Phil Hays to reply solve: phil_hays at not(coldmail) dot com  
 If not cold then hot
Reply to
Phil Hays

You need to specify the width ( how many bits ) in each counter and the expected MAX pulse rate. That tells you how much resource you need for the front end, at a minimum. Then, you might want to buffer this, so a read captures the whole counter into another latch - this avoids counter-change-during-read problems. This might fit in larger CPLDs like Altera MAXII or Lattice MachXO. [The MachXO can support their Mico8 small CPU ]

For the back end (USB) you could use a small uC with USB, or a USB-Serial chip (FDTI, SiLabs etc). Maxim have posted data on a nice MAX 3420 SPI-USB bridge device, that needs minimal SW support, and is much faster than the RS232 ones.

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

there are quite a few spartan 3 demo boards out there with LCD displays, 100 base-T and USB on board... sounds like a simple solution ?? I just got one from Memec for less than a grand with a spartan 3 1500

Of course .. you have to build software and hardware drivers for each interface. Not exactly trivial to a newbe.

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Reply to
Simon Peacock

Thanks a lot! :-)

Le "Le.Wang" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@news.dfncis.de...

Reply to
Le.Wang

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