On 3/26/2011 8:50 PM, Patrick Doyle wrote:
Hi Folks, I'm looking for a US distributor for a Balloon Board (http://www.balloonboard.org/) or it's equivalent -- perhaps one of you may have designed and sell your own equivalent. Basically, I'm looking for a standalone board with a processor (with it's associated flash& SDRAM) and an FPGA. I'm not terribly picky about the FPGA -- any reasonable Xilinx or Altera device should suffice. Does anybody on this list have any recommendations? I would prefer to buy from a gEDA supporter, and it will be logistically easier if I can purchase from someplace in the US. Thanks for any pointers. --wpd
Patrick,I don't see where you responded to any of the replies to your post. Did you find something that met your needs?
I am considering laying out a design that would include a Freescale Kinetis device and an FPGA. I am in the US and this would be an open source design using open source tools.
I haven't picked the details yet, but I have a preference for the Silicon Blue FPGAs. They only make small versions, but they are very, very low power which is my goal.
I had not been planning to include external RAM, but the K60 has a DDR interface and can be included easily. I assume that if you need that much RAM it means you intend to run Linux on it. Is that right? I don't know if Linux is ported to the K60, but I expect it would not be at all difficult to do since the K60 is an ARM CM4 (CM3 + DSP and SIMD instructions).
Does this sound interesting to you?I also have an interest in testing the Green Arrays GA144 multiprocessor. This device has 144 processors running at 666 MIPS each consuming less than a Watt with all running full bore. They are async processors and stop on a dime when waiting for input dropping power consumption to virtually nothing (100 nW per processor) able to resume processing at full speed in a fraction of a ns. They just need to identify a killer app and these devices will take off. The one aspect that may turn off a lot of potential users is the tiny on-chip memory, only 64 words in each processor. But external memory can be connected of course. This chip is not programmed in C, so you can do a lot more with very little memory. I think of it more like an FPGA than an MCU. A Field Programmable Processor Array, FPPA.
Rick _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user