[sdiy] Proposed DSP board

[cheater cheater]

Sorry, I meant that 'FPGAs used to only be one-time-burn, but are not
only one-time anymore' :)
The obvious advantage of a one-time-burn fpga is that you only burn it
one time, meaning no load time.

I wouldn't program a whole synth in an FPGA. I would instead program
the FPGA to have common, but very costly, building blocks. You could
have a simple fft command for example. Or a matrix inverse. Or the
z-transform. I'm not even going to mention umpteens of complex
multiplications. Then use that fpga as a coprocessor. Stuff like that
makes FPGAs just so sweet :)
It seems like a hybrid FPGA+DSP board would satisfy all cravings.
Stuffing either non-mandatory. The suggestion to make it work with
mios (which is ARM, not AVR, as was pointed out - sorry) still stands.
I see a very nice board :) I'm sure an FPGA + DSP board with
ready&tested onboard midi/patching/lcd/etc capabilities would see a
lot of warm reception, since there isn't something like that on the
diy community right now, and hasn't been for quite a long time!

On the other hand you might want something very cheap to make just a
single module, like say a VCO or reverb. Any cheap DSP that can easily
work on 64bit floats is going to be great for that. But that's a
completely different board altogether.. (and has been created to some
extent already)

Cheers
D.

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Eric Brombaugh <ebrombaugh1 at cox.net> wrote:
> Scott Gravenhorst wrote:
>>
>> Neil Johnson <neil.johnson97 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Depends - buy Actel anti-fuse FPGAs and it _is_ fixed!
>>
>> I'm curious though, to those parts offer higher density, higher speed or
>> some other
>> advantage that might be applied to a design that one _does_ want fixed?
>
> Actel's are used extensively in Hi-Rel & harsh environments. SRAM-based
> FPGAs are susceptible to soft-errors when hit by radiation.
>
> Eric
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