[Oberon] New FPGA Oberon board

[Bill Buzzell]

>
> There is one possible way to beat the economy of scale while being small.
> Join someone else's standard and design in a form factor that is exactly
> compatible. Electrically, pin to pin exactly the same.  Then you can use
> their expansion boards. Mechanically, the same dimensions and the same
> mountig holes. The same external connectors in the same exact places. Then
> you can use their enclosures. You do not have to think where to get those
> little trivial pieces, which in practice make a huge difference.


The Pipistrello is already utilizing just such a standard. It uses the
Papilio FPGA format which is quite impressive. They have a thick, three pin
span for very solid attachment. Suitable for high density pin arranging,
which we require for FPGA's.

The only shortcoming is that the SRAM eats the majority of the pins. If we
could only get at some more I/O's.

Aha! It appears that there are 14 pins still available on the existing
Spartan-6lx45 we can access ! It appears that we should be able to simply
stretch out some more board real estate/space (in the EagleCad
project), route these untapped 14 pins how/where we desire them, we have
plenty of I/O's now. This greatly expands the potential of this
board. There is no arguing that this is the "stoutest" modular setup I have
yet seen. Very, very rigid.

Magnus definitely know his stuff and the Pipistrello is truly top of the
line. I can't imagine finding a more knowledgeable expert in the FPGA world.

All we need is someone with the commercial EagleCad software to tweak the
Pipistrello pcb project, which is open source or even better ask Magnus
what he needs to "make it happen".

A "BeagleBoard Wing" could be easily realized as an add on.
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