Seem to me Ray what you are thinking as embeddedy is a bit below the target for the OGA asic. The embedded we are talking is the the single board pc market type stuff. The throw a PC at it area.
> > save a lot of money during development using an off-the-shelf x86 > > CPU/chipset combo (or perhaps even standard motherboard) with support > > that is good enough.
Have even tried to get these off-the-shelp x86 chipsets for a design? If your aren't talking serious volume its really hard. And in my experience with using these chips the support mostly non-existent. Or worse the rep tells you there is support but by the time you reach a real problem you already understand more about the chip than most of the FAE's and can't find (or not allowed) anyone who _really_ understands the hardware and can anwer difficult questions.
C) Cost is important too. $30 is ... high. That's a lot of money to blow on one chip. My CPU probably wouldn't cost that much, in at least half of my embedded designs.
Thats on par with all of the x86 video solutions I've looked at.
> (a) OGA cannot do what we need and
I am still trying to point out that that is not the point of my discussion. I am trying to say "Is what we think we need sellable?"
It works for me. I have several designs where the OGA chip would work quite well one of these had an EAU of 12k/year.
1) Make something that just sits on the PCI bus and indicates it has a ROM that has to run during boot. Allow the FLASH that contains the ROM to be reprogrammed in a relatively secure manner. This would allow you to write code that took over a PC at boot time. You could put a LinuxBIOS image in there, and have the LinuxBIOS boot your motherboard. The LinuxBIOS people are constrained by the fact that most motherboard ROMs are way too small. OGP could fix that.
I'm a LinuxBIOS developer. While I think this would be useful in some caes it, but doesn't really get around our space problem. The point you would want to go run the ROM is past the point where we need the extra space. Also LinuxBIOS wants to boot fast and if you leave the legacy bios in there (to run the expansion ROM) you are somewhat back to a slower booting system.
3) Make a simple 2D chip that is really easy to interface to. Make it produce digital signals to drive LCD interfaces directly. Lets face it, if an embedded app needs a screen, its likely to be an LCD panel nowadays. Mayyybe include some inputs to read a touchpanel or stylus, or shaft encoders, or maybe a button matrix scanner and some LED drivers.
This a possibility. I have a design I'm working on now with a NIOS II that is a display product. We have a custom LCD controller in there with it. We have talked about replaceing the NIOS II with an ARM9. The display controller is really simple. Basically a DDR controller and a FIFO for me to push data into the display ram. Works for our purposes but I find myself really needing some graphics type stuff such as display to display moves or some composting between display pages. It would have to be _really_ cheap though. This is all in a $15 altera part. -- Richard A. Smith _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
