[sdiy] New cheap FPGA development system

[Eric Brombaugh]

Harry Bissell Jr wrote:
> I'm wondering if you can add a fast enough
> DAC easily to get good quality audio out of it.
> Sure, the FPGA internally is fast enough but can the
> I/O keep up ???
>   

Good point - it doesn't matter how many gigasamples you compute in the 
FPGA fabric, if you can't get them out of that little box then they do 
you no good.

Apparently, the board was designed by Digilent, and they provide 
additional I/O expansion boards. Here's their analog I/O board:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=AIO1&Nav1=Products&Nav2=Accessory

That doesn't look too promising: in addition to only providing 8-bit 
converters, it has a proto-board on it :P

The good news is that the FPGA I/O pins are capable of running very 
fast, and there are a lot of them brought out to general-purpose 
connectors. There's no reason you couldn't lash up a decent audio 
quality DAC on your own daughter card. Not as convenient as having it 
built-in from scratch though.

Eric