Re: Homebrew STG card Update

["Ward M." <ward-at-metro.net>]

I didn't see any PCI cores there, but have you seen the FreeCore website?

www.freecore.com

Ward M.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Elson" <jmelson-at-artsci.wustl.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <emc-at-nist.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2000 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: Homebrew STG card Update


>
>
>
> Paul Corner wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Yes, and the amazing thing is that these chips go for about $35 in single
> quantity!  The advantage with the Xilinx is it doesn't need an outboard
> serial ROM, and can be reprogrammed almost indefinitely.  The programmer
> contains one interface driver chip, to boost parallel port signals to
> good CMOS levels.
>
> > > > 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.
>
> Yes, if anyone knows about a simple PCI interface code that is
> 'open source' I'd sure like to know about it.  We don't need DMA, 32-bit
> burst transfers, we can probably even live without interrupts.
>
> Jon
>
>
>