Software/Hardware FPGA Dev Board that runs Linux

bforsse writes "The ML300 allows engineers to develop hardware with HDL synthesis/simulation and software with standard GNU tools. The entire system is implemented inside one FPGA with an integrated IBM PPC processor. The board comes with all the peripherals that a standard motherboard or laptop has and then some. It currently ships with MontaVista Linux, a number of other linux flavors and OSs are in the pipeline. Maybe this new merging of the hardware and software worlds will settle some of the religious wars between hw and sw engineers?...ok, maybe not."

Comments

The V2Pro's are very cool parts

[nweaver]

EG, the XC2VP7 which is used in the core of that board has a PowerPC (>250 MHz), 8 SERDESes which can speak Gb ethernet with optical transievers (among other things), about 100 Kb of RAM, and 11,000 4-LUTs and flip-flops.

Xilinx promises that at the end of the year, in suitable quantities (>25,000), they will be $100/each.

Re:VHDL

[dlbowm]

Icarus (http://www.icarus.com/eda/verilog/) is a competent Verilog (not VHDL) open source simulator. It even has some support for sythesizing to some FPGA libraries.
Verilog is more common than VHDL in the US, so this is the only open source HDL tool I've used. Primarily, we are still slaves to Synopsis and Cadence though.

Re:What can you do with it.

[anonymous cupboard]

I don't think there is a single 'HOWTO' on the subject, but essentially an FPGA is a chip with a large array of simple logic gates that may be interconnected in a programmable way. Tools exist to simulate and compile logic expressions into a form where they can be downloaded into an FPGA as a gate interconnection matrix. Once the FPGA has been programmed, it then will execute the logic function.

As with software, a lot of modules exist (mostly quite expensive) for logic blocks up to and including microprocessor cores. Rather than having a chip with a single function, it is possible to squeeze multiple functions upto the limits imposed by the gate count.

FPGAs can be reprogrammable, or programmable once only. There is a often fusable link inside that once blown prevents reprogramming or designs to be read out.

If you are producing quantity, then you can go from an FPGA component to a gate array which is programmed by a photographic mask during manufacture. The mask is prepared from the same program that created the FPGA. The setup costs are high, but once you talk about big numbers of chips, the component becomes significantly cheaper than an FPGA and often better performing.