Hello guys, I've seen on http://fpga.sunsource.net that the SPARC core of the OpenSPARC T1 can be implemented on the Xilinx XC4VLX200 FPGA. I googled for it but I was unable to find any development board supporting this Virtex 4 chip: are you aware of anything that one could use to prototype it? Many thanks in advance, Fabrizio -- ============================================ Fabrizio Fazzino - fabrizio at fazzino.it Fazzino.IT - http://www.fazzino.it ============================================

Hi...

I'm guessing that the part you specified (suffix of "200") is the
smallest in the family that will support the SPARC core. There might be
dev boards with the larger sized chips in that same Virtex family. I'd
start at Xilinx's site and browse the dev boards there, filtering by
Virtex family...

-Chris


On Sun, 28 May 2006 2:09 am, Fabrizio Fazzino wrote:

Chris Palmer wrote:


Hi Chris,

I've been looking a while on the Xilinx site before posting.
All I've seen is that some boards support Virtex 4 LX with
packages FF668 or SF363, but the device we need (that is the
biggest in the Virtex 4 family) makes use of the FF1513
package.

It seems that I have to look for such these boards elsewhere!

Fabrizio

Check out The Dini group, http://www.dinigroup.com They have a range of boards based on Xilinx/Altera, and for being in the "ASIC prototyping" arena their prices are quite affordable (the cost of their boards are like "the cost of the FPGAs plus some margin", as opposed to some of their competitors that charge an order of magnitude more). Compared to the competition they are quite much "do it yourself", ie they don't supply a lot of flashy software to help you make the boards do something useful. Our neighbours Hardi electronics, http://www.hardi.se, also have some V4 boards that probably would work for you. A good starting point for finding these and others is Synplicity's web: http://www.synplicity.com/partners/pip/index.html Best regards Gunnar Dahlgren Axis Communications AB, Sweden Fabrizio Fazzino wrote:

Many thanks Gunnar,
I found your informations very useful.
I just had to note that the cheapest board based
upon a 200K Virtex-4 device has a cost of 8,000 US$
or so.

Cheers,
Fabrizio


Gunnar Dahlgren wrote:
-- ============================================ Fabrizio Fazzino - fabrizio at fazzino.it Fazzino.IT - http://www.fazzino.it ============================================

Fabrizio Fazzino wrote:


Yes, for these very large FPGAs you'll probably end up spending that
kind of money. I did a survey a little more than a year ago, and at the
time I would have had to pay around $3500 for one XC2V6000 FPGA (about
the largest available back then). And that's only the FPGA, no board.
And the XC4V200 seems to be about twice the size of XC2V6000. Of course
prices come down over time, but anyway those FPGAs are still very
expensive animals.

Regards
Gunnar