On 3/26/2011 8:50 PM, Patrick Doyle wrote:
Hi Folks,
I'm looking for a US distributor for a Balloon Board
(http://www.balloonboard.org/) or it's equivalent -- perhaps one of
you may have designed and sell your own equivalent. Basically, I'm
looking for a standalone board with a processor (with it's associated
flash& SDRAM) and an FPGA. I'm not terribly picky about the FPGA --
any reasonable Xilinx or Altera device should suffice.
Does anybody on this list have any recommendations?
I would prefer to buy from a gEDA supporter, and it will be
logistically easier if I can purchase from someplace in the US.
Thanks for any pointers.
--wpd
Patrick,
I don't see where you responded to any of the replies to your post. Did
you find something that met your needs?
I am considering laying out a design that would include a Freescale
Kinetis device and an FPGA. I am in the US and this would be an open
source design using open source tools.
I haven't picked the details yet, but I have a preference for the
Silicon Blue FPGAs. They only make small versions, but they are very,
very low power which is my goal.
I had not been planning to include external RAM, but the K60 has a DDR
interface and can be included easily. I assume that if you need that
much RAM it means you intend to run Linux on it. Is that right? I
don't know if Linux is ported to the K60, but I expect it would not be
at all difficult to do since the K60 is an ARM CM4 (CM3 + DSP and SIMD
instructions).
Does this sound interesting to you?
I also have an interest in testing the Green Arrays GA144
multiprocessor. This device has 144 processors running at 666 MIPS each
consuming less than a Watt with all running full bore. They are async
processors and stop on a dime when waiting for input dropping power
consumption to virtually nothing (100 nW per processor) able to resume
processing at full speed in a fraction of a ns. They just need to
identify a killer app and these devices will take off. The one aspect
that may turn off a lot of potential users is the tiny on-chip memory,
only 64 words in each processor. But external memory can be connected
of course. This chip is not programmed in C, so you can do a lot more
with very little memory. I think of it more like an FPGA than an MCU.
A Field Programmable Processor Array, FPPA.
Rick
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