[sdiy] New cheap FPGA development system

[Nicholas Gregorich]

 As far as I remember, the late RFX expansions for Emu E4 Ultra were based on an FPGA.  I think it basically handled routing of digital audio signals.  My guess is an FPGA is easily fast enough and powerful enough to drive a handful of DACs and ADCs.  Even slow (8MHz) AVRs can reproduce low fidelity audio using their onboard PWM or (I believe) higher quality sound with a DAC interfaced via SPI.

I too have Spartan 3 board waiting for my experimentation at work.  Unfortunately, there's no time for such research at the moment.

Nick.
 
On Thursday, May 25, 2006, at 02:33PM, Harry Bissell Jr <harrybissell at prodigy.net> 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 ???
>
>we're getting one at work so maybe I'll study it more.
>I do not have the schematics yet
>
>H^) harry
>
>--- Eric Brombaugh <ebrombaugh at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> Harry Bissell Jr wrote:
>> > Iplayed with this system yesterday at a Xilinx
>> > training class.  Its pretty cool... but I don't
>> know
>> > if it is fast enough for a hardware synth.
>> >   
>> 
>> It's got a 50MHz oscillator on-board and the DCM
>> blocks in the FPGA can 
>> be used to multiply that by up to 32x. The part on
>> this board is a -4 
>> speed grade with internal flip-flops that are rated
>> for at least 200MHz. 
>> With 20 18x18 multipliers, that works out to
>> 4Gmults/sec.
>> 
>> How fast do you think a hardware synth needs to be
>> able to run (and what 
>> constitutes a reasonable hardware synth capability)?
>> 
>> Just curious. :)
>> 
>> Eric
>> 
>> 
>> 
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