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On Thu, 2003-05-01 at 23:02, Andrew Rogers wrote:Sorry, no PCB or schematic for anything with FPGAs. I haven't got involved with FPGAs yet.
James Ogden wrote:
Hi,I've thought quite a lot about an embedded Linux project but haven't really found any time to actually design anything.
I'm new to the DClug and was wondering if anyone on the list is doing any interesting embedded Linux work? Personally, I'm considering developing an FPGA based development board for embedding the or1k http://www.opencores.org processor and some peripherals. As physical hardware is a little difficult to work with from afar (unlike the rather wonderful or1k simulator), I would be interested to hear from anyone in the vicinity who wants to / is doing similar things so that we can possibly get together.
James.
I've thought about an embedded Linux project based on a Samsung CPU. The advantage of the Samsung S3C4510B is that it has on-chip ethernet and ARM core.
If you want a board with some Flash, RAM and ARM CPU you'll find one in a Samsung ML4500 laser printer, but it doesn't have ethernet.
An FPGA based design would give you the advantage that many specialised interfaces could be developed without significant chip count.
The one thing that deters me from FPGA design is that there is no GPLed Place and Route or bitstream generation software for the modern FPGAs. Most of the tools from the Xilinx WebPack ISE work under wine though.
One the hardware side, I was concerned that I would not be able to solder close pitch SMDs. I tried soldering an SSOP28 package to a home made PCB and was suprised by the result. SM rework flux proved really useful.
Regards Andrew Rogers
If it re-assures you, I've seen many PQ208 packages being placed down by hand and working first time, most of the being Xilinx XC2S parts.
I would be interested if you had a PCB (for money) and a schematic for aforementioned board lying around, although I must admit that the reason for considering the FPGA route was its capability to easily integrate additional features and rapid debugging. It also takes a great deal of the learning curve away if you have a completely stable toolchain ;)
http://geda.seul.org/tools/icarus/
If you know of a verilog simulator, I would like to hear about it. I have found the Alliance simulator for VHDL (just compiled it), but have not had a really good look for verilog sims (or1k is verilog).
Regards Andrew Rogers
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