Hello, Some links about Hardware itself :
http://www.eetimes-ace.com/ http://www.easic.com/ http://www.easic.com/index.php?p=faq1 Q. What is different about Programmable ASIC technology compared to other Structured ASICs and FPGAs? A. Competing Structured ASICs require numerous custom masks since both routing and logic are mask-customized. The expense of custom masks is high and grows exponentially with each new process node. By efficiently using a maskless lithography customization, Programmable ASIC devices provide unprecedented benefits of quick and low cost product development together with a seamless path to volume production. The Programmable ASIC prototypes devices are identical to the high volume production ones, as they both share the same base wafers and the same data files are used for the via customization. The only difference is in the manufacturing process - prototypes and low volume quantities are customized with Direct-Write eBeam equipment and high volume production devices are customized with a single via-mask. In an FPGA, both the routing and the logic are configurable. Configurable routing requires significant silicon overhead and in Programmable ASICs the configurable routing is replaced with via-masked routing. Therefore, Programmable ASICs achieve over 200:1 area reduction in routing compared to FPGAs. This silicon efficiency translates into dramatically lower costs, higher performance and lower power consumption. From Nick S-A : >1) Best, use a purely functional language. Haskell is the most common >of these, and you could probably force a Lisp dialect into this mold. >2) Use stream programming, as in BrookGPU. This leads to C-like code, >but has the advantage of running really fast. It does have a few >restrictions, but BrookGPU is based on OpenGL, which basically means >we just need to support the right subset of OpenGL and we have >distributed computing for free. Some links about Streams & FPGA : http://graphics.stanford.edu/streamlang/ http://www.streams-c.lanl.gov/ http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cs6813/Lav01ca.pdf http://www.ll.mit.edu/HPEC/agendas/proc02/presentations/pdfs/mattson.PDF http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2006-October/018645.html Best Regards, Will _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
