ARM cores in FPGA ?

Hi,

Maybe you can consider to go to the FPGA's of ACTEL they have a free ARM core for in there Mixed Signal FPGA:

Kind regards,

If they are working on WindowsCE development, the Actel FPGA is not a good choice because WindowsCE need a Memory Management Unit. The ARM7 core in Actel FPGA does not provide this feature.

Stéphane, Does the ARM9 has to be in the FPGA? If it doesn't have to be, you can use an ARM9 Core Tile board

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"Vhdl.eu" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:44917270$0$10467$ snipped-for-privacy@news.skynet.be...

what Actel says "FREE" means 120USD per FPGA for ARM license fee in small qty. the do not want any small customers at all :(

Antti

I've always wondered how much value was in the Actel ARM the whole announcement and strategy has seemed strange to me. I just took a look at the CoreMP7 product brief

Max Freq : 22.714 - 29.699 (Depends on device and if debug is supported) Tiles : 6,104 - 8,587 (Depends on device and if debug is supported) Utilization: 26.0% - 99.3% (Depends on device and if debug is supported)

This seems to be well below the performance level of a Xilinx MicroBlaze or Altera NIOS-II soft core and extremely below the level of a a Xilinx PowerPC hard core with a much higher area cost.

I know that there is niche out there for ARM7 prototypers, but with the performance and area cost does this even come close to a general market need?

Ed McGettigan

-- Xilinx Inc.

Yes, it looks more like a 'marketing tick box', than a compelling engineering argument.

You can buy 70MHz ARM uC, with FLASH Code storage, for under $2, and these have quite high performance SSP interfaces - so a system that needs a FPGA ( and not a huge code base) could slave one of these, and save a lot of $$.

Larger ARM uC are also available, and normally for about the same price as the FLASH + SDRAM needed to support a FPGA core would be, but with all the high memory bandwidth stuff on one chip - giving large savings in PCB area/layers/EMC.

-jg

Thank you for your answers.

But the fact is that in our electronic department we design development kit boards for main ARM processors used with Win CE ( AT91, NADIA, XSCALE, Samsung 2SC2412 and others .. ) and the associated BSP in our software departement.

The idea, here in the FPGA department, is to use the power of the Xilinx's System On Chip capabilities, to offer a custom system like the ones designed for the WIN CE platforms. The optimal way would be to have a synthetizable ARM7/9 core to link it to a SOC in the FPGA.

Second way would be to find an ARM core with no peripherals in a external chips and connect it to the FPGA.

For now I didn't find anything like this.

Stéphane.

"sjulhes" a écrit dans le message de news:

Ed McGettigan schrieb:

The 99.3 utilization is for smalles device the plain core does fit in at all, its only for marketing, the core cant actually be used in that device as there is nothing else as the core that fits.

The performance is pretty low as of max clock frequency and the FPGA "resource price" is also huge, so yes it does not actually compete with FPGA processors. ASFAIK Actel is only looking for a few big customers, and maybe a few more occasional customers, but for small or medium volume productst the actual costs of the "free" ARM core are way too high.

But what I found VERY VERY interesting is the fact that CoreConsole uses SPIRIT XML standard for the IP parametrization and interconnect description.

Antti

That seems a slightly strange angle to take, as the peripherals are effectively free. Your main choice is ROMless, or on Chip FLASH : and that is decided by your application. Even the tiny ARM, have fast serial ports, that can connect to FPGA. Larger ones, have external memory interfaces, so you could memory map the FPGA onto those. More pins, and slightly better bandwidth.

-jg

Apologies for my ignorance on this, but why is this significant?

Ed McGettigan

-- Xilinx Inc.

SPIRIT promises to enable a plug-and-play environment for IP integration that is tool, language and platform agnostic. This allows developers to import internal or third-party SPIRIT compliant IP into various tools or flows to quickly integrate IP and build an SoC. As the SPIRIT ecosystem continues to grow more and more tool vendors and IP providers are supporting SPIRIT. SPIRIT is essentially just a way to store SoC meta-data such that files, components, component generators, memory-maps, interfaces, interconnect and abstraction levels are defined in a standard human and machine readable way (that's eXtensible). SPIRIT provides a standard way to interface between different tools, abstraction levels, companies, code generators, and teams (i.e. design, verification, validation, and documentation).

Regards, Jeremy

Why not check out the WebNet module from

Have some more info on ARM9 + FPGA boards but that cannot be distributed here just yet.