You can do quite a bit more in FPGA's than only glue logic (unless you meant CPLD's)...
Nowadays, even a relatively modest FPGA has enough logic resources to host a few 32-bit microcontroller cores such as Xilinx Microblaze or Altera NIOS. I am not talking about some 1 k$ FPGA here, but a Cyclone-II from Altera or a Spartan-III from Xilinx which can be bought for 30$ or so in quantities of 1.
Take any of the larger Virtex-II to Virtex-4 or Stratix FPGA's and you can host a whole lot of custom logic. More than anyone can design in many years of effort (unless you repeat the logic, or make 1000 bits wide buses, obviously). The only reasons that the industry still uses ASIC's a lot is because they are much cheaper in volume and you can usually get the logic to run at higher speed.
Well, it will at least cost the price of the FPGA (xc3s1500) which is quoted at Avnet at 70$US for the 320 pins version and 115$US for the 676 pins version (in qty of 25-99)...
I suppose they'll have to either buy a lot of FPGA to get price reductions or wait until the price of those programmable chips come down. Add to this the price of DRAM, 250 MHz 3-channel DAC (which would not be on the FPGA), power converter, serial Flash for FPGA configuration and extra discretes. My guess on the final price... Easily more than 300$US. The enthousiast willing to contribute to the open-source project will also have to get some simulation and FPGA tools which Xilinx do not give away for free (it's like 1000$ or more for the FPGA Tools and even more for the simulator).
FPGA's are great for prototyping designs, but the expense associated with the EDA tools to develop a 1.5M gates FPGA will limit the contributors...
Nevertheless, its a cool project if it allows more people to learn how to code in VHDL/Verilog. It will find a niche in universities where students don't have to pay for EDA tools.
They have not put the whole thing on a PCI card, probably because it's even more fun to integrate a CPU core and build the whole system-on-chip on the FPGA while at it.
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Ubuntu Hardy has it as the default Firefox browser.
Nowadays, even a relatively modest FPGA has enough logic resources to host a few 32-bit microcontroller cores such as Xilinx Microblaze or Altera NIOS. I am not talking about some 1 k$ FPGA here, but a Cyclone-II from Altera or a Spartan-III from Xilinx which can be bought for 30$ or so in quantities of 1.
Take any of the larger Virtex-II to Virtex-4 or Stratix FPGA's and you can host a whole lot of custom logic. More than anyone can design in many years of effort (unless you repeat the logic, or make 1000 bits wide buses, obviously). The only reasons that the industry still uses ASIC's a lot is because they are much cheaper in volume and you can usually get the logic to run at higher speed.
I suppose they'll have to either buy a lot of FPGA to get price reductions or wait until the price of those programmable chips come down. Add to this the price of DRAM, 250 MHz 3-channel DAC (which would not be on the FPGA), power converter, serial Flash for FPGA configuration and extra discretes. My guess on the final price... Easily more than 300$US. The enthousiast willing to contribute to the open-source project will also have to get some simulation and FPGA tools which Xilinx do not give away for free (it's like 1000$ or more for the FPGA Tools and even more for the simulator).
FPGA's are great for prototyping designs, but the expense associated with the EDA tools to develop a 1.5M gates FPGA will limit the contributors...
Nevertheless, its a cool project if it allows more people to learn how to code in VHDL/Verilog. It will find a niche in universities where students don't have to pay for EDA tools.
Cheers!
Boards such as the Multimedia Board http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards/multimedia/ contain everything you would need. Not cheap though...
They have not put the whole thing on a PCI card, probably because it's even more fun to integrate a CPU core and build the whole system-on-chip on the FPGA while at it.
Cheers!