[Oberon] Hardware; was: Development boards

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Peter:

>Should have made the question more specific.  Is FPGA essential for
>every control system and embedded system?

Not essential. Many embedded systems use PIC or 8051 micros. There are lots of CPU chips you can use. FPGAs can emulate such chips, which sometimes makes sense, but most often it does not.

> Any chance of a FPGA being standardized ever?
> Many old chips have a similar history.  Is standardization
> fundamentally impossible for FPGA?   Just a question of maturity?

The essence of the FPGA is that it can be customized for many different uses. As soon as the silicon vendors figure out how to make the FPGA even more flexible, they will immediately change the design. The FPGAs are constantly mutating in different directions.

However, note that the *tools* to use the FPGAs have been standardized. These are the Hardware Description Languages (HDL) such as Verilog or VHDL. Here you have a high degree of standardization. Once you learn Verilog and/or VHDL, you can start using FPGA from different vendors and different generations. The FPGA Oberon System is a good example. You can take the original set of Verilog files developed for Spartan-3, and kind of easily (kind of...) retarget them to another FPGA. 

Thank you,
Wojtek










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Tel: +1 604 670 0140            Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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