[sdiy] More Xilinx 3E board comments

[Magnus Danielson]

From: James Patchell <patchell at cox.net>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] More Xilinx 3E board comments
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:21:21 -0700
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.2.20060608131952.01814358 at pop.west.cox.net>

> The FPGAs are ram based...turn off the power...and they erase.  Every time 
> you power them up, they need to be reprogrammed.  Generally, this is done 
> from a flash serial memory, which can be programmed via the JTAG...you will 
> be able to see this when I demo the board.

With the 3E you should do parallel self-load from the FLASH. The rest of the
FLASH is easilly used as program memory for the CPU(s).

> Yes, the pico blaze would probably work just fine for a midi synth.

Indeed. A highly guilty party at Xilinx presented it as a "bit banger" CPU on a
presentation of Microblaze and Picoblase the other week.

MIDI-processing fits very nicely to 8-bit, but one should not wast good FPGA on
emulating a classic CPU which doesn't map in well.

Cheers,
Magnus