[chbot] FPGA stuff

[Mark Atherton]

Hi All,

A point of confusion that is my fault : NIOS I was ARM based. Altera 
the have since moved to NIOS II which is also RISC, but not ARM.

 From what I heard, for the 'dipping toes in" part of the project, it 
almost doesn't matter who the vendor is providing that the demo 
hardware is low cost  Charles has found a capable Altera board for 
US$49 which seem to the lowest cost dev system out there.

However Richard was doing some investigations and may come up with an 
even lower cost option.

-Mark

At 11:17 a.m. 22/02/2011, Charles Manning wrote:
>Hi All
>
>A few points on FPGAs...
>
>1) Mark said that the Nios (Altera's soft core)  was equivalent to the ARM.
>While it is a RISC and is little endian it does not seem to be compatible
>with ARM, just comparable to.
>
>All the vendors have some sort of softcores. Normally freebie 8-bitters and
>paid IP for the larger parts.
>
>A lot of free stuff is available on opencores.org
>
>2) What are they used for? Well pretty much anything that can use a mix of
>logic and CPUs. Xilinx had a very nice page of design examples on their
>website a few years ago but I cannot find it now. Some example applications:
>
>* Set top boxes/ digital TV: Custom logic to perform correlation etc for
>decoding the signals, MPEG image decoding, HDMI encoding while a softcore CPU
>does the management + menus etc. In DVD players FPGAs are often used to do
>the error correction etc.
>
>* Electric guitar:
>http://www.embeddedstar.com/press/content/2004/1/embedded12299.html Gibson
>guitars made an electric guitar around a Xilinx FPGA. The FPGA runs all the
>controls as well as well as providing custom digital interfaces (midi etc)
>and DSP to make all the sound effects.
>
>More recently Gibson have moved to Altera which shows that VHDL can be highly
>portable
>
>* Printers: Many laser printers etc use FPGAs for image processing since that
>is way, way faster than software.
>
>Mark mentioned the idea of having custom instructions in an extended CPU
>architecture - an idea that fits in with WISC (Writable Instruction Set
>Computing). This is really handy for image processing were you likely have to
>merge images, apply a bitmasks and such. With regular general purpose CPUS
>you might have to apply many instructions to apply the processing. With WISC
>it can be just a single instruction.
>
>-- Charles
>
>
>
>
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