Well, if all you needed was something to sequence addresses and send data to video encoder, that's a rather small piece of logic.
Yeah exactly. Most of the logic is all in the DDR controller.
> the memory bandwith is spent doing video. And if you go off and make > the cpu do something invovled you can get glitches in your video > output. I think it's probably better for us to have our own RAM. We just need to make sure there's enough bandwidth for the max video mode we want plus some for drawing.
Yes by all means have your own RAM. Thats exactly my point. And exactly why we have a NIOS and a custom LCD video controller rather than one of those chips.
> I do know that if I had such a chip and it was cheap (<=$10) it whould > have had a _really_ good chance of ending up in our current display > product. Well, you've given us something interesting to think about. Of course, of the FPGA alone costs more than that, we can't quite hit that market, but perhaps we could get that cheap with some low-end ASIC technology.
The reason I used that number is because that is what our quote is for getting the altera in quantity. So there's at least 1 FPGA that doesn't cost more than that. For us the chip would have to meet that, be cheaper. or offer enough additional functionality that we would pay the extra for. Our products will ship with an altera on them. Would the DDR be inside the ASIC? If so then that adds a few more bucks. All I'm pointing out is that I've got something similar in a small and cheap FPGA. If you were to swap all the logic used by the NIOS II CPU with video functionality logic I think you would have a pretty darn nice video controller. Well, at least it would meet my low-end display needs. I'm not sure my needs match the mass market though, and at $10 you would need to sell a whole bunch of them to turn any real profit. -- 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)
