My project advisor is partial to xilinx fpga's so we're going with an xilinx virtex II qpro. It is QML certified. I kind of wanted a hardware 8051 because we might be reprogramming the fpga at times, and also updating the program for the 8051. There will probably be a base program stored in ROM that may have the original code, but will have an instruction for loading a new program to RAM and will then begin running from the beginning of that address. I don't want to have to reprogram the fpga with the 8051 as an IP core, and then have a problem while programming it causing errors that can't be fixed. But this is an issue I should probably speak with xilinx about and also just study the documentation on the fpga to see if there is any way around this.

Thank you

Doug