[Oberon] Porting FPGA Oberon to new boards.

[Jörg Straube]

Altera's DE1 comes close. Unfortunately has only 512K SRAM and other stuff not needed to implement the RISC5..
http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/de1/unv-de1-board.html

I think Altera's DE2-115 would work. But its more expensive as its FPGA is much bigger than actually needed for our purposes.
http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/de2-115/unv-de2-115-board.html

Paul, your comments?

br, Jörg

> Am 06.03.2014 um 04:18 schrieb Srinivas Nayak <sinu.nayak2001 at gmail.com>:
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> Collected few points from our last discussions, that we should look at when we think of porting FPGA Oberon to a new board.
> 
> - Verilog tool chain support needed.
> - Need to check native clock speed of board and clock divider code.
> - New mapping of names and location of the pins, if needed.
> - Small and simple do-it-yourself-daughter boards, for SD-card hard disk, mouse, wireless modules, needed if not found in-built on board.
> - Minimum 1MByte (2x256Kx16) of extremely fast (10ns) old fashioned static RAM; memory interfacing trouble should be minimum.
> - USB programability.
> - Cheaper.
> 
> I am a novice. If missing anything, please add.
> Do we have any boards having all this?
> 
> 
> With thanks and best regards,
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> Srinivas Nayak
> 
> Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
> Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/
> 
>> On 03/04/2014 06:40 PM, Paul Reed wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>>>> I feel sad that Spartan 3 is becoming obsolete.
>>> I agree. The more recent Spartan-3E based Nexys-2 board from Digilent
>> 
>> A few points of background about the Digilent Spartan 3 board which may help.
>> 
>> First, don't be sad!  ;-)  Everything of course becomes obsolete in our
>> world (tech); it's actually useful that Digilent have discontinued this
>> board in a rather timely fashion (just after I released the binaries for
>> it, bang!) as a reminder that sooner-or-later, they would have done so
>> anyway.  As in all things (like Windows XP!) support cannot (of course) go
>> on forever.  Around the time I started the project, the board was even
>> better value for money at $109, and has gradually been creeping up in
>> price ever since. A clue. :(
>> 
>> Even though I noticed that the silk-screen says copyright 2004, I chose
>> this board for the project to replace the Ceres because it is simple, and
>> because ETH have over 200 of them which they currently use in several
>> courses.  They all seem to be the 200Kgate version, but (depending on
>> whether you believe the tools) the current RISC5 machine only just fits.
>> Hence I have tended to recommend that people buy the 1000Kgate version if
>> they wish to experiment, as the additional cost was marginal, all things
>> considered.
>> 
>> The simplicity of the board means that it is 'just enough' (with the
>> addition of a small and simple do-it-yourself-daughterboard for the
>> SD-card hard disk, mouse and wireless network module) to implement the
>> Oberon system in a nice resource-constrained and understandable way.
>> Porting the simplicity, rather than the system, to another board would be
>> quite hard.
>> 
>> (The RISC processor itself is relatively easy to port to other FPGA
>> boards.  I have had it running in various guises on Xilinx FPGA boards
>> made or not made by Digilent, and also on an Altera FPGA board, for
>> example.)
>> 
>> The real killer feature about the Spartan 3 board is the 1MByte
>> (2x256Kx16) of extremely fast (10nS) static RAM (as in, real good
>> old-fashioned SRAM, not pseudo-SRAM for example!).  I haven't found a
>> board which provides sustained, completely random-access cycles anywhere
>> near as fast; anything else I have seen would imply a memory interface
>> which would dwarf the rest of the whole design in its complexity.  Of
>> course, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this. :)
>> 
>> HTH
>> Paul
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
>> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>> 
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