Re: Homebrew STG card Update

[Paul Corner <Paul.Corner-at-tesco.net>]

Hi All

Progress is slow at the moment - The digital IO and glue logic is just about
finalised, just the analog sections to go. It looks like I can fit it all into
the required space.
Although with all the recent discussion about USB and coments onthe Sensoray
PCI card, is there going to be enough interest to make it worthwhile having a
run of boards made.
Time will tell - not that I have much to spare at the moment, so I may not be
ready to get the PCB's made until the summer.


Jon - as a side note, Lattice sent me a CD with details of a 'free' PCI design.
Subject to signing a NDA. Might be worth a closer look for anyone contemplating
that route. Having looked at the FPGA chips, most of the logic could be burnt
into just one chip. The real disadvantage of this is the pin counts on the
chips. 178 pin QFP or worse, BGA packages ( surface mounted PGA's) and the pin
count goes up with the gate density.

> > > Another possibility is to encode all the logic, both ISA interface,
> > > digital I/O, and the encoder counters into a programmable gate
> > > array device.  Then, the entire board would consist of one big
> > > chip, like the Xilinx XC95160 and one or two A/D and D/A
> > > chips.
> >
> > He's right about that... plus with canned PCI interface libraries
> > (using these chips is like writing C code) interfacing to that more
> > popular bus would no longer be unrealistic.
> 
> I'm still looking for a cheap PCI library.  One that I know of is $9000.

Regards, Paul.