I wasn't clear in what I wrote, sorry. I ment, I wasn't talking about parts with processor cores in them. I basically ment that a future FPGA will be fabric surrounded by ADCs, DACs, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, VGA/DVI, USB, 1394 ... cores either hard for the more complicated stuff and soft for the simple things. Basically, I see a higher level of integration with the most commonly used items.
---Matthew Hicks
..and the processor guys are also comming from the other direction.
ST have a couple more of their volume NRE (mask) Devices Design flow is like this :
"Both the SPEAr Plus600 and the SpearHead600 come complete with a dedicated development board that allows developing and testing of the customer system with minimum time and resource requirements. By using an external FPGA that mirrors the SoC?s internal configurable logic block, designers can proceed with the software and hardware development without waiting for the final validation. Once the customer SoC passes the functional qualification, full production can ramp up in eight weeks? time from the final RTL availability."
Looking at your list: Y ADCs, ~ DACs, Y Ethernet, ? SPI, (probably there somewhere..) Y I2C, ~ VGA/DVI, LCD support anyway ~ USB, Yes, with the PHY N 1394 ( market too small ) you missed RTC, DualARM926 cores, and the biggest challenge of all (for the FPGA vendors) :- achieving a sensible Icc level
"The price is $12 for the SPEAr Plus600 and $10 for the SPEAr Head 600, in quantities of 20,000 pieces."
for what they offer, those prices are not bad, and it will be interesting to see where these devices end up.
-jg
Sure, but it's considerably less than half as expensive.
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