Michael (Micksa) Slade wrote:
> /Maybe /they can put an FPGA on there that can achieve the same
> performance and functionality as the Sigma chipset (you would know that
> better than me), but I reckon there are plenty of cost concerns. For
> example, would an FPGA actually be any cheaper than an ASIC?
An ASIC plus an FPGA of size X will probably be about the same
cost as an FPGA of size 2 * X.
> Also
> there's the development cost, which for Zensonic would probably be a big
> factor as evidence suggests that they're not a big company.
FPGA development is relatively cheap in comparison to the
cost of development of the rest of the hardware. They may
well have licenses DSP cores designed by other companies.
> How fast can an FPGA go these days?
Xilinx has two families; Virtex and Spartan. The Virtex chips
will go an order of magnitude faster than if needs to for this
application. The Spartan family is more than a match for this
kind of application.
For example, here's an Ogg Theora encoder in an FPGA:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3888835064.html
Two things to note; encoders are usually significantly more
expensive in terms of resources than decoders and secondly,
the Xilinx Spartan chip used in this design is one of the
smaller ones in the Spartan 3 family.
Erik
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Pastafarianism : http://www.venganza.org/
The intelligent alternative to 'Intelligent Design'.
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
