RE: cine J14

On Mon, 13 Oct 1997, Ozdemir, Steve wrote:

> ps - The real appeal of an FPGA solution is that all a person has to do
> is buy the Xilinx FPGA part (under $30) and wire up an EPROM to it (with
> the FPGA's wiring schematic on it) and away you go! If you want to
> wirewrap/solder, then go right ahead. As I understand it the FPGA
> development environment is only used once to translate (and debug) the
> schematic to the EPROM. Once you've done all that work, you can burn as
> many EPROMs as you like and just hook them up to Xilinx FPGA chips.

        I'm pretty sure you still have to program the FPGA itself. The
configuration PROMS obviously DO configure the FPGA, but since most
chip programmers have options to program FPGAs, I think you need to
actually program them.

        I'm guessing a little bit here, but I think the programming of the
FPGA itself may set the routing between the CLBs, while the configuration
PROM loads the correct values in the the SRAMs of all the CLBs, or
vice-versa.

        Anyways, I agree that it is still pretty easy. If you are serious
about the FPGA project, I will volunteer to write a verilog model of the
exercisor once the schematics get put up. That should speed your project
along quite nicely, as most FPGA compilers that I have dealt with either
USE verilog, or use something similar. I'd need to see those schematics
to guess how long it will take, but I'm rough-rough guessing that it won't
take too long, since I hacked out my model of the Cine CPU in about 2
weeks.

Joe
Received on Tue Oct 14 08:48:06 1997