I've seen the future of DIY (was RE: [sdiy] Tiny FPU chip/16 bit micros?)

[Rainer Buchty]

Today was the first of a two-day session on SoC development sponsored by
Xilinx which I had the luck to attend...

Needless to say that I was simply blown away. Take this processor core,
attach some UARTs, maybe an Ethernet core, some special (custom) logic,
write your program in C for the chosen processor core -- press a button,
download the stuff into the FPGA and have your SoC up and running.

And it doesn't even need a high-priced Virtex-IIpro or Virtex-4, it's
already big fun with the rather cheap Spartan-3 with 200k gates. The
almost only soldering to do is getting the fine-pitch QFP or BGA
soldered to the board -- but we've seen people doing that with household
irons and halogen spots.

Tomorrow will be the hands-on session on installing and running embedded
Linux on such a SoC... Can't wait.

Rainer (now happy owner of a Digilent Spartan-3 eval board)