[sdiy] What to do with XC4003A's

[patchell]

    The XC4003 is very small, 3000 gates, 200 flip flops.

    I have thought about what you are talking about.  I have expermented with
the Altera tools and their APEX parts (100,000 gates), and yep, you can do some
pretty cool things in those.  Time is the major killer of big projects like that
at the moment.

    -Jim

Grant Richter wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> I don't know what the gate count is for that part. But if it is high enough
> you can implement a full multi-timbral multi voice synth engine including
> keyboard encoder.
>
> My best friend is the Chicago area Xilinx field applications engineer. We
> have spent much time discussing the possibilities of big FPGAs as the new
> hobbiest/hacker/midnight engineering hardware platform of choice.
>
> With a sufficient gate count, you can "hardware code" complex functions that
> would otherwise take a microprocessor and software. Since one of the
> graphical interfaces is schematic based, it allows hardware oriented
> engineers to play in an area previously requiring advanced software
> expertise.
>
> There is still an awful lot of engineering knowledge that has never made the
> transition to digital platforms. During the technology transition from
> continuos time computation to discrete time computation, the crude
> development tools did not allow the accumulated knowledge base to be
> transferred directly to digital systems. It is only recently that
> development tools have become sufficiently advanced to allow the use of
> familiar methodologies on the new platforms.
>

--
 -Jim
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