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AT91CAP9S500A (ARM9 + FPGA-port)

Why FPGA?:

• 20 March 2007 Green supercomputer is 'go' in Scotland Quote: "...A supercomputer 10 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster than its traditional equivalents..."

Take a look at this microcontroller, that integrates an ARM9 microcontroller and a dedicated FPGA port: AT91CAP9S500A. It has "only" a max. clock at 200MHz, but can use a FPGA for hardware acceleration, that could be used for video (de)compression, aacPlus v2/HE-AAC v2 sound (de)compression and many other things. HE-AAC v2 is better than MP3.

• AT91CAP9S500A Quote: "...The AT91CAP9S500A is built around a 12-layer bus matrix, allowing a maximum internal bandwidth of twelve 32-bit buses. Its distributed DMA architecture enables multiple data transfers to take place between the processor, memories and peripherals with minimal processor overhead...".
• GNU-Based Software Development on AT91SAM Microcontrollers
• Maybe this is a good tool?: BYU JHDL, Open Source FPGA CAD Tools
• 02/05/2007, FPGA tool bottleneck stalls HPC Quote: "...Current FPGA synthesis, placement and routing tools are written for hardware designers, not software programmers simply trying to accelerate an algorithm..."

This seems to be a good hardware mix (ARM+FPGA). It does Ogg Theora or MJPEG in the FPGA with 1 million gates:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/elphel, board 10353, camera hardware, Main page, Imaging solutions with Free software and open hardware

Just another FPGA+microcontroller example:

• The Alya Project (old page)
• PIC assembler source code, Altera FPGA code. Schematic: [1], [2], [3]

I do not think this means what you think it means... I read "...and a metal programmable (MP) block of 500K gates of digital logic." as meaning that it's a one-time programmable block, more akin to a standard-cell ASIC than an FPGA. This is supported by the fact that their development board contains a separate FPGA chip. Now, granted, having a 500K gate ASIC on board an ARM is a cool thing... but not quite as cool as this chip appeared at first glance.

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