[chbot] FPGA stuff

[Charles Manning]

Mark

From what I have seen, Nios I is 16-bits. That will definitely not be ARM 
compatible. There have never been any 16-bit ARMs.

But that is an academic point. Altera recommends the use of the 32-bit Nios II 
and provides slick tools for that.


> 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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