Wish List - Hardware:FPGA

Revision as of 18:36, 22 December 2007

AT91CAP9S500A (ARM9 + FPGA-port)

Why FPGA?:

• October 17, 2007 ucr.edu: UC Riverside Research Leads to Self-Improving Chips with Speed ‘Warping’ Computer science research results in new technology that can outperform standard microprocessors up to 1,000 times.
• 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..."
• Dec 10th 2006 Open Graphics Project Newsletter Quote: "...We know how long you have dreamt about the possibility of a fully open graphics card. We have the First Photographs of what will be a genuinely Open Graphics Card. This card is not a dream. The card is real...The prototype, is a PCI based FPGA development card with dual DVI output, TV-out and three 300MHz Analog to Digital Converters..."

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?:
  • Compiled Acceleration of C Codes for FPGAs (pdf) Quote: "...Riverside Optimizing Compiler for Configurable Computing. A C/C++ to VHDL compiler...Same speed as hand-written VHDL codes...ROCCC is not intended to compile the whole code to FPGA. Only compute intensive code segments, typically parallel loops..."
  • 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.

Possible FPGA

This FPGA is just an example:

• Spartan-3AN FPGA Capabilities Quote: "...Simple and secure embedded application storage with up to 11Mb of integrated user Flash...Enable simple arithmetic and math functions as well as advanced DSP functions to derive over 330 Giga MACs/sec...Up to 32 18 x 18 embedded multipliers support 18-bit signed or 17-bit unsigned multiplication, and can be cascaded to support wider bits..."
  • XC3S1400AN-4FGG676CES $91
  • XC3S200AN-4FTG256CES $25.87

Tool for FPGAs

• xilinx.com: ISE WebPACK is the industry´s only FREE, fully featured front-to-back FPGA design solution for Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista

Asynchronous FPGA, AFPGA

• Achronix-ULTRA
  • Achronix preps 2-GHz Asynchronous FPGA for sampling in 2007
  • Asynchronous VLSI and Architecture, Cornell University: Asynchronous Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (AFPGAs) Quote: "...integrated pipelining support..."
  • Programmable Asynchronous Pipeline Arrays (2003) John Teifel, Rajit Manohar