Altium FPGA board

I subscribe to the PEDA mailing list for users of Protel in its various incarnations, just for schadenfreude - I don't use it. I vaguely remember someone offering their 'free' Nanoboard for sale. 8-) Altium has just announced a couple of new daughterboards for it.

Leon

The Nexar package is not really that overpriced. It allows to develop FPGAs with a 8051 kernel built in, with debugger, compiler, everything. No, I didn't get Nexar and nanoboard yet. I'm glad to have left the 8051 architecture with just one pointer register behind me. I'm also not a friend of C compilers either and am therefore happy with an AVR and something else but C. The low number of units I ship doesn't forbid to have an FPGA plus an AVR on a board. That may change from a certain number of units upward, though.

Rene

I should have been more crisp, $8,000 is waaaaaaay overpriced for me. Even the $1000 I spent on the Proteus package

A friend of mine hat the CircuitStudio package and was not complimentary so I steered clear of that too.

Bringing it back on topic...

Have you played with the FPSLIC stuff? AVR core plus FPGA? I've got the development board as I was looking at some sort of custome baseboard controller (SMBus, i2c, etc) and it looks great but Atmel doesn't seem particularly committed to it ...

--Chuck

Yes, for non-protel user it is a lot to just have a look at. And when you don't have a certain number of projects where you could save a lot of time on development, it could be hard to justify.

As said, I had no gain in putting any core into an FPGA yet. While using a standalone cpu let you select between a bunch of compilers, they somehow vanish when you put a core into an FPGA. BTW, what does an I2C or SMB, that cannot be done with some port pins ?

Rene

You mis-read what I typed. The FPSLIC system embeds a "real" ATMEL AVR core inside an FPGA fabric. All the ATMEL compilers work as you'd expect, all the peripherals are on the expected pins, except that the pins go into the FPGA fabric where you can either route them to an "off chip" I/O (using them then like you would normally) or to some device you've cons'd up inside the FPGA.

Imagine a multichip module where the FPGA and the microprocessor are on the same subtrate.

--Chuck

No, no, I didn't misread. The more modern compilers come with an IDE, including programmer that download the code and the data and even allow to debug the code on target. This likely won't work anymore, as the integration likely does not go this far. And the ADC is missing of course too.

I doubt the AVR core is from Atmel itself, rather from some guys who took the pain of assembling an AVR act-alike. Atmel is of course interested in selling their own chips.

Rene

Looks nice, except for the price. For that kind of money, I can buy a Spartan II, IIE, or III that is big enough to hold my FPGA design along with a small processor soft core and block RAMs for the memory.

Then we are talking about two different things. Atmel part number AT94K05 is an Atmel AVR core that is surrounded by an FPGA. It is sold by Atmel and all the standard IDE's and tools work with the AVR core which, unless Atmel is really stupid, is the exact same core they use in their other chips. The evaluation kit number is STK594 and it plugs into the STK501 base. The part number on this demo board is the AT94K05.

This IS thier own chip.

--Chuck