| ??? 03/02/05 18:56 Read: times |
#88904 - No panacea Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Jan Waclawek said:
what is/would be the price of such device (with some reasonable(?) density) I think the Triscend E505 and E512 were about GBP 5.00 and 7.00 in thousands. Since the demise of Triscend, I don't know how their successor, Zylogic, is pricing them. And what about development tools' cost Being an 8051, as I've said many times before, any standard 8051 tools could be used for the software development. Obviously, you need some extra tools to do the FPGA stuff. I think Triscend's FastChip was a couple of hundred quid. learning curves? That was the beauty of the FastChip system - you could just drag & drop "SoftModules" into the FPGA with no need for any HDL programming at all (you could also import from 3rd party HDL & schematic capture tools, if you wanted). I don't think it would be much different from getting to grips with the configuration of something like the SiLabs parts, with their paged SFRs and Crossbars and stuff. there must be some drawbacks Well, of course, once you've got your required set of peripherals, all that configurability becomes superfluous - but still costs money. So not ideal for very small and/or low-cost and/or high volume projects. A drawback with the Triscend E5 was that it needed an external configuration ROM - so there's a security issue, and you don't get a 1-chip solution. :-( Triscend always used to say that their FPGA process was not compatible with Flash processes - but Actel seem to manage it OK... The only other comparable thing available today seems to be Atmel's FPSLIC - which is an AVR with on-chip FPGA and Flash! Their software doesn't seem to have the ease-of-use of FastChip, and is waaaaaaaaaaay more expensive. :-( |
