Re: [avr-gcc-list] [OT] Need For Speed (FPGA)

[Matthew MacClary]

On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 01:22:52AM +0200, Martin Bammer wrote:
> At the moment I prefer SpartanII because they only need 2 different
> supply voltages. Spartan3 needs 3, which leads to a much more
> complex design.

    The number of reference voltages isn't the whole story. AFAIK the
power supply design for SpartanII's is actually more complex because
of the large power draw during start up, people usually accommodate
this behavior of the SpartanII using a staggered power up scheme. If
Martin has built systems around both FPGAs then he would know better
than I how they compare, but my impression is that the Spartan 3 is
faster, denser, and has better mannered power characteristics.

     I would like to second Reza's question about what to do when it
starts looking like your project may need wider, faster computation?
Specifically does anyone have suggestions about how to get the
computation done and also leverage a team's experience with avr-gcc
style development?  I suppose that you could gang several AVRs
together with a shared memory architecture for example.
     A key feature of avr-gcc that I need to keep is that the whole
build process is scriptable.  I am just getting into the Xilinx tool
flow, but when I read through example projects that are basically all
screen shots of mousing around Windows GUIs I get a little nervous
that development would have to slow down to accommodate that style of
development.

-Matt


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