Altera's DE1 comes close. Unfortunately has only 512K SRAM and other stuff not needed to implement the RISC5.. http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/de1/unv-de1-board.html I think Altera's DE2-115 would work. But its more expensive as its FPGA is much bigger than actually needed for our purposes. http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/de2-115/unv-de2-115-bo... Paul, your comments? br, Jörg
Am 06.03.2014 um 04:18 schrieb Srinivas Nayak <sinu.nayak2001@gmail.com>:
Dear All,
Collected few points from our last discussions, that we should look at when we think of porting FPGA Oberon to a new board.
- Verilog tool chain support needed. - Need to check native clock speed of board and clock divider code. - New mapping of names and location of the pins, if needed. - Small and simple do-it-yourself-daughter boards, for SD-card hard disk, mouse, wireless modules, needed if not found in-built on board. - Minimum 1MByte (2x256Kx16) of extremely fast (10ns) old fashioned static RAM; memory interfacing trouble should be minimum. - USB programability. - Cheaper.
I am a novice. If missing anything, please add. Do we have any boards having all this?
With thanks and best regards,
Yours sincerely, Srinivas Nayak
Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/ Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/
On 03/04/2014 06:40 PM, Paul Reed wrote: Hi all,
I feel sad that Spartan 3 is becoming obsolete. I agree. The more recent Spartan-3E based Nexys-2 board from Digilent
A few points of background about the Digilent Spartan 3 board which may help.
First, don't be sad! ;-) Everything of course becomes obsolete in our world (tech); it's actually useful that Digilent have discontinued this board in a rather timely fashion (just after I released the binaries for it, bang!) as a reminder that sooner-or-later, they would have done so anyway. As in all things (like Windows XP!) support cannot (of course) go on forever. Around the time I started the project, the board was even better value for money at $109, and has gradually been creeping up in price ever since. A clue. :(
Even though I noticed that the silk-screen says copyright 2004, I chose this board for the project to replace the Ceres because it is simple, and because ETH have over 200 of them which they currently use in several courses. They all seem to be the 200Kgate version, but (depending on whether you believe the tools) the current RISC5 machine only just fits. Hence I have tended to recommend that people buy the 1000Kgate version if they wish to experiment, as the additional cost was marginal, all things considered.
The simplicity of the board means that it is 'just enough' (with the addition of a small and simple do-it-yourself-daughterboard for the SD-card hard disk, mouse and wireless network module) to implement the Oberon system in a nice resource-constrained and understandable way. Porting the simplicity, rather than the system, to another board would be quite hard.
(The RISC processor itself is relatively easy to port to other FPGA boards. I have had it running in various guises on Xilinx FPGA boards made or not made by Digilent, and also on an Altera FPGA board, for example.)
The real killer feature about the Spartan 3 board is the 1MByte (2x256Kx16) of extremely fast (10nS) static RAM (as in, real good old-fashioned SRAM, not pseudo-SRAM for example!). I haven't found a board which provides sustained, completely random-access cycles anywhere near as fast; anything else I have seen would imply a memory interface which would dwarf the rest of the whole design in its complexity. Of course, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this. :)
HTH Paul
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