[sdiy] New cheap FPGA development system

[Sarah]

One advantage of using their EDK tools is that by using the Microblaze OPB
bus you get easy access to a lot of free soft peripherals including an easy
to use low gate count delta sigma DAC (or ADC). I haven't tried using the
DAC for audio use yet  only for programmable reference voltages but I think
it could be quite successfully used.
Developing systems with these OPB peripherals is very straight forward and
adding your own peripherals onto the OPB bus is quite easy - EDK allows you
to add OPB master/slave user logic using configurable FIFOs or DMA.
I think it is the ease of development into the FPGA that makes the
Microblaze attractive over ARMs AMBA bus (other processors like PICs are not
in the same performance league).

Ian



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl]On Behalf Of Eric Brombaugh
Sent: 25 May 2006 21:14
To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: Re: [sdiy] New cheap FPGA development system


Paul Schreiber wrote:
> Whoo-whooo.. just in time for my 50th birthday :)
> /just placed the order

Cool! Let us know what you end up doing with it. I've got a Xilinx ML402
(V4SX35 + goodies) that I've been using for the day job and it's pretty
fun ($600 though, so a bit steep for mad money). It's got an AC-97 codec
on it that's just crying out to be driven with a huge bank of
oscillators. One of these days...

The biggest gripe I've got about these boards is that they want you to
use their embedded soft processors, but the embedded software
development tools are fairly expensive.  Ideally, I'd hang a cheap
PIC/AVR/ARM/etc on an FPGA for biggest DIY bang/buck.

Eric



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