Hello, I am new to this list, and new to fpga, and diving in way above my head in terms of my basic electronics knowledge... however just stumbling across the technology (isn't the www, google, wikipedia, etc... great!), this stuff looks really interesting and something I would like to learn for fun... Sorry for the newbie questions, but I did skim the FAQ and some of the list archive.... (but, may have missed something...) 1. Is there a place where other "free" cores are listed? I have come across several on this site. Even if the project is not maintained here, I would think it to be useful if there are links somewhere to other locations. For example, Sun's new OpenSPARC T1... at http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html, and Xilinx.com has several free (some are free, and it looks like some more are free if you get their development board and tools, and others are simply not free). Plus a few other sites I ran across that I don't recall. 2. On the subject of the Sparc T1... has anyone tried to place it on an fpga yet? If so, will it fit, and what speed/fpga? Can it easily fit on multiple FPGAs? 3. This was sort of on the archive, but not completely... As a beginner, what development board should I get? Correct me if I'm wrong... but, I think the Spartan-3E starter kit is too small/slow for what I really want to do (including gigabit Ethernet interface). However, I think it will be powerful enough to test parts of my ideas without investing a lot of money, at which point I should be able to just purchase the higher-end chips, or get bored... and it will let me experiment with their EDK in addition to the ISE (which alone might be enough to test some ideas on paper with the schematic and other tools). I also assume the EDK would be even better to start with for a beginner. Does any other vendor include as much software with their development boards? (or offer low-cost software)? Even if the software options are not as good, does any other vendor offer higher speed or higher density parts for a better price? I don't want to get too used to the Xilinx tools if that not what I want to end up with when I need a bigger/faster fpga... 4. I think I seen answers to this already in the archives, so feel free to skip... Any recommended resources for VHDL or Verilog (books, weblinks, etc..) would be appreciated. From what little I have seen, some of the open cores I am interested in appear to be in Verilog and others appear to be in VHDL, so I will probably need to learn a at least a little of each... Thanks.

Hi

The T1 seems much to big for me to fit on one fpga. Multiple fpga's is tricky
because you have to build the interfaces.
I don't know the altera stuff, but if you wan't to get a big fpga there is the XUP board from xilinx. Which is pretty cheap for academic customers (.edu?). http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Nav1=Products&Nav2=Programmable&Prod=XUPV2P Otherwise see: http://www.fpga-faq.com/FPGA_Boards.shtml (down at the moment of writing) Cheers ST

>>

On 3/23/06, Lauro, John jlauro at umflint.edu> wrote:

This is the most complete listing and hosting of free HDL that I'm aware of.

2. On the subject of the Sparc T1... has anyone tried to place it on



Highly unlikely to work. Mainly it's a question of scale: the processor is
designed to run in a full-custom process, using a mid-range die in a recent
process. That puts it well beyond the capabilities of any single FPGA.

3. This was sort of on the archive, but not completely... As a


I've been using an ML402 development board, and been pretty happy with it.
The Virtex parts are a lot more capable than the Spartan ones, but the tools
to map into them get pricey, so it's partly an economic issue.

4. I think I seen answers to this already in the archives, so feel
I'll admit upfront I have a strong Verilog bias, but I also think the free tools available for Verilog are better than their VHDL equivalents. Cver is a commercial-quality simulator, and Dinotrace and GTKwave are, if not up to the same standard, good enough to get the job done. The "standard" verilog book used to be the Thomas and Moorby book, but it's a bit dated now. With the recent profusion of materials, I would imagine you can find some free courseware on the 'net that gives the basics, and there's certainly enough sample code available here and elsewhere. - Guy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.opencores.org/forums.cgi/cores/attachments/20060324/85135acc/attachment.htm

Aloha!



But the Niagara T1 contains eight cores, each of which is a single-scalar
in-issue but multithreaded core. You should be able to run a one or a few
of those cores in an FPGA.

The Niagara architectures is actually designed to be scaleable in many
different ways. Number of cores, number of threads/core, number of
cores/shared resource (caches, external mem-interface, accelerator
co-processors etc). Sun is naturally looking at scaling UP, but my guess
is that you also should be able to scale DOWN.

The Niagara is actually quite interesting for embedded solutions. Less
reliance on caches for example should provide better support for
deterministic real-time performance.

I haven't looked at the code yet though. Hopefully it is less
custom-design -ish than the PicoJava code which basically was a hand
written netlist. I guess that we at Ericsson i Gothenburg were one of the
very few outside Sun that actually did some serious attempts at running
that code through a complete tool suite. The Pico in PicoJava was clearly
not a reference to the size of the CPU.

--
Med vänlig hälsning

Joachim Strömbergson
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