[Oberon] Hardware versus software development.

[skulski at pas.rochester.edu]

Jorg:

> I know. I had the following step-by-step approach in mind
> 1) - try to find another board, possibly with more memory for future use

Did I not say that I am working on designing the board? I do not want to
set a firm deadline because I have a few urgent projects to complete
before rolling out the new board. Basically, I have one of my previous
designs that I want to adopt. It will be an entry-level board targeting
the Oberon System development. In order to keep the cost down I will use
Spartan-6 LX9. More powerful boards may follow later. I have plans how
these should look like, but no firm commitment to develop these.

>    - port the Verilog code to the new board.
>    - whole Oberon system stays untouched
> 2) introduce color
>    - SW decision (Oberon)
>      Assuming I have one bit per R-G-B:
>      How do I represent the color in the
>      framebuffer? RGB in 3 separate planes or RGB
>      as 3 consecutive bits.

This is secondary because HW can route bits. I was thinking of PWM
modulation, which is a cheap but not a very good solution. The image may
get blurred. Nexys is using a R-2R resistor ladder. There are DACs on the
market that are pretty easy to use. So there are different ways. Also, a
more modern solution would be an HDMI chip. These decisions will be driven
by hardware cost and complexity, while the SW will adopt.

>    - HW decision (Verlog)
>      There, I have to decide with RISC5 or with RISC6.
>      RISC5: I stay with 1 GB, I allocate more memory to video,
>      and have less for code, heap and stack.

In the entry-level board I want to use the SRAM chips. This is due to the
pin count that the LX9 has in the TQ-144. In future designs the video
memory needs to get physically separated. Video has stringent timing
requirements, while the program/data memory has a more relaxed timing. A
good video solution is BRAM, but there is never enough of it.

>      RISC6: increase address bus by 1 and hence add another 1GB

The advanced boards will use DDR3 chips which are cheap. Then the RISC
processor can be adopted to the required address size.

BTW, I have a better name for the CPU than RISC which is too generic, but
I am afraid of N.Wirth reaction to changing his beloved names.

Wojtek