Hi Rick, I'm still collecting information. So far, the Balloon board sounds the most like what I need: a currently shipping and supported processor + FPGA board. But the "currently shipping" part is negotiable, as it will be at least a month or two before I can do anything at all with the board (other than gather information about it). A collaborative design effort would be fun, but again, it will be at least a month or two before I will have even the hint of a possibility of collaboratively designing anything :-)
In other words... I'm still thinking. Thanks for giving me more to chew on. The GA144 sounds quite interesting for a very specific application that may be coming down the pike pretty soon, but I don't have any good killer app ideas for it. --wpd On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:47 AM, rickman <gnuarm.g...@arius.com> wrote: > On 3/26/2011 8:50 PM, Patrick Doyle wrote: >> >> Hi Folks, >> I'm looking for a US distributor for a Balloon Board >> (http://www.balloonboard.org/) or it's equivalent -- perhaps one of >> you may have designed and sell your own equivalent. Basically, I'm >> looking for a standalone board with a processor (with it's associated >> flash& SDRAM) and an FPGA. I'm not terribly picky about the FPGA -- >> any reasonable Xilinx or Altera device should suffice. >> >> Does anybody on this list have any recommendations? >> >> I would prefer to buy from a gEDA supporter, and it will be >> logistically easier if I can purchase from someplace in the US. >> >> Thanks for any pointers. >> >> --wpd > > Patrick, > > I don't see where you responded to any of the replies to your post. Did you > find something that met your needs? > > I am considering laying out a design that would include a Freescale Kinetis > device and an FPGA. I am in the US and this would be an open source design > using open source tools. > > I haven't picked the details yet, but I have a preference for the Silicon > Blue FPGAs. They only make small versions, but they are very, very low > power which is my goal. > > I had not been planning to include external RAM, but the K60 has a DDR > interface and can be included easily. I assume that if you need that much > RAM it means you intend to run Linux on it. Is that right? I don't know if > Linux is ported to the K60, but I expect it would not be at all difficult to > do since the K60 is an ARM CM4 (CM3 + DSP and SIMD instructions). > > Does this sound interesting to you? > > I also have an interest in testing the Green Arrays GA144 multiprocessor. > This device has 144 processors running at 666 MIPS each consuming less than > a Watt with all running full bore. They are async processors and stop on a > dime when waiting for input dropping power consumption to virtually nothing > (100 nW per processor) able to resume processing at full speed in a fraction > of a ns. They just need to identify a killer app and these devices will > take off. The one aspect that may turn off a lot of potential users is the > tiny on-chip memory, only 64 words in each processor. But external memory > can be connected of course. This chip is not programmed in C, so you can do > a lot more with very little memory. I think of it more like an FPGA than an > MCU. A Field Programmable Processor Array, FPPA. > > Rick > > > _______________________________________________ > geda-user mailing list > geda-user@moria.seul.org > http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user > _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
