[oc] Some questions

[volodya@mindspring.com]

 Hi all :)

 I have some silly questions.. Perhaps someone will be kind enough to
answer them.

 First of all what I am trying to do: 
 I want to have an analog data acquisition board that can capture at least
 40MS/s and deliver it the main memory for further processing in real
 time. There are plenty of 40MS/s boards available, but they either have 
 slow interface (RS-XXX or parellel port), do not deliver real-time or
 simply too expensive. The good news is that ADCs are cheap (from
 Maxim,TI or National) and one can even get a reasonably priced evaluation
 board. So the next step for me is to get the data from the board to the
 RAM. Unfortunately the situation with digital input boards is similar..

 So here goes:

 * I have found this development board:

http://www.insight-electronics.com/solutions/kits/xilinx/spartan-iipci.html

   which has Spartan II chip on board. The good news (for me) is that
   this board costs $145 - quite acceptable. The bad news it is the bare
   board. With something called "Xilinx PCI core" and other nonsense (like
   DOS drivers) the price is around $1000 - not what I want to spend.

     + would "PCI bridge" core be the right thing to use for PCI interface?

     + the board designs on opencores.org seem to use Xilinx Vertex FPGA,
       maybe someone would comment on Vertex versus Spartan II, maybe 
       I should get a different board.. (Unlike ISA, PCI seems too tough
       for me to manufacture at home).

     + with this board there seems to be a bootstrapping problem:
       without PCI core the board cannot be programmed by CPU, but the
       PCI core needs to be downloaded to it first. It looks like the
       right way to go is to use an EEPROM and seperate EEPROM programmer. 
       Am I off here ?
       
  * And some general questions:

     + the FAQ mentions the lack of open source compiler/tools

         o Did this change since it was last updated ?

         o Are there any (working) tools/howto to program FPGAs ?

         o What is needed to work with FPGAs ?

         o Any references (to book or webpages) to help are greatly
           appreciated (I've got Jamils bookmarks), in particular
           are there any standard (good !) books on design of VHDL
           compiler and other tools ?
     
         o are there any thumb rules for gate counts needed to implement
                * PCI core (Xilinx uses 10K)
                * SDRAM interface (???)
                * FFT (???)
                * digital I/O (I guess a few.. I am wrong ?)

         o is it silly to hope to program FPGAs by hand first ?
           (ala machine code for cpus) or is there a better way.

 Responses are very appreciated :)

                     thanks !

                         Vladimir Dergachev

                         http://www.sourceforge.net/users/volodya



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