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

VHDL

[Amon Re]

Does linux even have any good VHDL simulators?

Re:funny...

[WhaDaYaKnow]

...the term 'engineer' is used very loosely when you are refering to software engineers...

Well that's what hardware engineers think when the software engineer disagrees to install MS-DOS 3.3 to test the hardware. ;-)

Seriously though, I've been through two board bringups, both Intel Architecture.

The first board was considered 'done' by the hardware guys, after it booted DOS. I told them that that was not really a test, and sure enough months (and numerous patch wires) later we finally were able to use _all_ the features on the board and boot Linux and Win95.

On the second board I was most impressed with the software tools hardware guys used. NOT! Although the board was more or less up and running I found a couple of places where transmits were connected to transmits and receives to receives. I asked why the schematic capture tools didn't catch such obvious mistakes. I know the software can, but quite honestly, all the software used for hardware design feels like it was written by, uh, hardware guys. :-O

Seriously though, the software tools that hardware engineers use leave a lot to be desired (I mean, the last board I worked on was in 2002 and they used a DOS based program to do the layout for peet's sake)

In defense of the hardware engineer though, he'd use symbols provided by the manufacturer and they, for some reason, could not be bothered to indicated the type of signal a pin has properly (e.g. input, output, bidir, etc..)

Until today I never understand why they'd risk the change of having to do a new rev of a board vs the cost of spending a few minutes to create the symbols properly.

Then again, I've seen software 'engineers' do the same stupid stuff. ;-)

Hardware/Software convergence - the real thing

[kinnell]

The xilinx parts are for embedded systems, and have no real benefits for your average PC user (hence they can market them them for $$$).

Look here for genuinely cool FPGA technology. They use transputer based technology to implement parallel algorithms in, well, parallel. The demos are very impressive - real time raytracing @50MHz anyone?