On Friday 27 May 2005 07:22 pm, Martin Bammer wrote: > Hi, > > I can recommend SpartanII and Spartan3. These chips are quite cheap and > powerful. A development system under Linux is available since a few months. > It's free. I recommend to set kate as an external editor, because it's so > much better to work with. 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. Because you are a beginner you should buy a > starter kit. If you plan to create complex designs you REALLY should learn > VHDL. VHDL programming is possible (and very comfortable) with the IDE from > Xilinx.
I second Martins suggestion to learn VHDL. Regarding who's silicon to purchase, I mostly work with Altera. But, that's not to say Xilinx does not have good products - They do. FWIW, I seem to recall that a couple of AVR processors have been implimented in fpga's. I believe that I saw the projects at opencores.org. If my memory serves me correctly, at least one of them claimed to have a 3X increase in speed as compared to the atmel offerings. Even if this is not exactly accurate, I'd still bet you could massage out a lot of I/O pins using this route. Hmm. This makes me want to load a chip and see how well it plays with gcc. That would be a hoot :) Regards Marvin Dickens Alpharetta, Georgia USA _______________________________________________ AVR-GCC-list mailing list AVR-GCC-list@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-gcc-list
