Re: gEDA-user: fpga

["Harold D. Skank" <skank54@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 20:35 -0500, Bob Paddock wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 November 2005 05:32 pm, Dan McMahill wrote:
> > > In the project I am currently working on, I am trying to do most
> > > of the work in a DSP rather than the FPGA so users can make more
> > > modifications without having to install non free sofware.
> >
> > Out of curiosity, which DSP chip can be programmed with free (open
> > source or otherwise) software?  
> 
> The Microchip dsPIC parts.  Their compiler is a port of GCC.
> 
> > btw, I think altera figures that if you can't buy their development
> > tools without flinching then
> 
> Lattice has some support under Linux but I have not used it, just the Windows 
> version at work.  I have found the Lattice parts and tools to be cheaper than 
> Xilinx or Altera.

Harold Skank here.

I'm using Lattice, ispLEVER, version 5.0 under RedHat ES, version 4.  I
became attracted to Lattice by their aggressive pricing, and for the
most part I came out OK.  There were some twists however.

Particularly, I wanted to program the chips in Verilog, permitting me to
use the gEDA, Icarus-Verilog package, but I couldn't get their package
to accept the Icarus EDIF output.  Turned out that they didn't support
that (something to do with accessing their libraries), but they did
provide me with a free copy of a student license that permitted me to
submit the Icarus-Verilog package to either their Mentor Graphics or
their other (whatever it was) compiler to generate a usable EDIF output.
That output, in turn ran under their Linux version of ispLEVER to
generate the required chip code.

I haven't actually programmed a chip yet, so I can't offer full
assurance that the approach works, but it looks OK to now.

I should also add that I first loaded the Lattice package using Fedora
and only switched to RedHat when I though I ran into trouble.  It
appears that I never needed to load RedHat.

> 
> There is also Actel that never seems to get much press.  You can now get a 
> real ARM core in their parts, without the hideous fees.
>