Re: gEDA-user: US Distributor for Balloon Board

[Patrick Doyle <wpdster@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rick,
I'm still collecting information.  So far, the Balloon board sounds
the most like what I need: a currently shipping and supported
processor + FPGA board.  But the "currently shipping" part is
negotiable, as it will be at least a month or two before I can do
anything at all with the board (other than gather information about
it).  A collaborative design effort would be fun, but again, it will
be at least a month or two before I will have even the hint of a
possibility of collaboratively designing anything :-)

In other words... I'm still thinking.  Thanks for giving me more to
chew on.  The GA144 sounds quite interesting for a very specific
application that may be coming down the pike pretty soon, but I don't
have any good killer app ideas for it.

--wpd


On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:47 AM, rickman <gnuarm.geda@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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