[chbot] Kickstart in FPGA course...

[Charles Manning]

On Wednesday 16 February 2011 18:50:06 Paul Davey wrote:
> >> >Actel have a nice USD99
> >> >http://www.actel.com/products/hardware/devkits_boards/smartfusion_eval.
> >> >asp x
> >> >
> >> >This has a hard-wired internal Cortex-M3 ARM CPU + 200k gates etc etc.
> >> > USB download :-). Linux only available for parts of the toolchain
> >> >  :-(.. OLED display, Ethernet, DACs and hot and cold running water
> >> > :-).  Web server software...
>
> I like this idea, do you know of any other boards with FPGAs
> containing arm cores? or perhaps even other common processor cores.
> This would be rather useful for various robotics applications, if you
> had enough ram you could run a scripting language on the arm core and
> have custom interface logic in the fpga :)
>
> I did some googling and I think xilinx have done some arm + fpga chips
> but I don't know of any boards that have them or if they even have any
> for our price range at all.

Paul

Almost all FPGAs (of sufficient size) will run an ARM soft core, but the issue 
becomes licensing. It is very hard for Joe Bloggs to negotiate an soft core 
license with ARM.

The Actel Smartfusion parts have a hard-wired ARM core which is going to be a 
better implementation than a soft one. Xilinx were talking of doing this too.

Some FPGAs make it easy to do ARM soft cores by pre-licensing certain parts. 
You pay a bit extra with some of that going to ARM. Xilinx talked of doing 
this and I don't know if they have. Actel IGLOO/E  series do this.

Of course all FPGA vendors provide their own soft cores and there are projects 
like  OpenCores providing various CPU options. Since most common CPU 
architectures are proprietary, they are seldom available on opencores. Many 
of the opencores CPUs are retro hobby cores (6502, 8080, HC11,...). Notable 
exceptions are AVR and LEON-SPARC.

Bummer though is learning all the idiosyncrasies of a new CPU architecture and 
setting up a slick OpenCores development environment requires significant 
FPGA-foo. Far easier in my book to go with something pre-packaged by the 
vendors.