[Oberon] Digilent Spartan 3 Board

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jack Johnson [mailto:knapjack at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, 14 April 2014 6:31 AM
> To: Paul Reed; ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Digilent Spartan 3 Board
> 
> > 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. :)
> 
> Is that a design problem that would eventually have to be overcome anyway?
> 

I would also be interested to know as I am also investigating how I can port
it to other hardware. As far as I can see, the only issue with the Digilent
Nexys-2 board is that the RAM access speed is 70ns instead of 10ns. Is that
a show-stopper? If not what are the consequences of using the slower RAM?

In the meantime for anybody else who wants to run Project Oberon on actual
hardware the Spartan 3 boards are still available for sale from retailers.
e.g. NKC Electronics:

http://www.nkcelectronics.com

Regards,
Chris

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com