Re: DOES IT MAKE ANY SENSE

"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@xxxxxxx> writes:
> I think the OP meant "tens of MHz" of *emulated* speed, which is
> on par with the fastest software emulators. Since hardware emulation
> has at least an order of magnitude advantage over software emulation
> speed, that seems quite plausible.

Without excessive effort spent on optimization, most common 8-bit
microprocessors can be reimpleented in scurrent low-cost FPGAs (e.g.,
Xilinx Spartan 3, slowest speed grade) with a clock cycle of over 75
MHz.

The publicly available 6502 and 6809 cores run at that speed, and I see
no significant impediment to developing a 65816 core that would run at
that speed.

With faster FPGAs (e.g., Xilinx Virtex 4) you can get about twice the
speed, but at many times the cost.

I've been having lots of fun playing with a Xilinx Spartan 3 Starter Kit
($99 from Xilinx or Digilent w/ XC3S400 chip, $149 from Digilent w/
XC3S1000 chip), and an Avnet development board for the XC4VFX12, a
Virtex 4 FPGA with an onboard PowerPC processor ($249 for the board).

Xilinx offers their WebPack development software as a free download for
Windows and Linux (x86). If you haven't done logic design in an HDL
before, you'll want to pick up a good book on VHDL or Verilog (both of
which are supported by the Xilinx software). I personally recommend
"Designer's Guide to VHDL" by Ashenden.

If you haven't done logic design before, you should probably take a
class or at least read a book on logic circuit design before jumping
into FPGAs. HDLs make the design process look sort of like writing
software, but that's a bit misleading. If you actually try to design
for an FPGA just like software, you won't get good results.

Eric
.

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