The Gadget Factory, our partner on the Open Logic Sniffer, implemented the Arduino using an FPGA. It’s based on the AVR8 soft processor Jack developed previously for the Butterfly Platform. The Butterfly Platform is a rapid prototyping board that gets you going on FPGA projects in no time, and now you can implement things in a FPGA using simple Arduino Sketches. This project should be compatible with existing Arduino sketches that don’t need analog inputs.
via Hackaday
I love it, but what for ?
Is there a performance gain ?
Anyhow, will Seed run a batch of this boards ?
I avoided FPGAs for a long time, there is simply to much to learn and I felt I could youse my spare time more usefully, but this app would be a nice way to learn at least the basics.
Putting soft processors in FPGAs is actually pretty handy. It is the most convenient way to handle communication with an external system, for instance to get your logic analyzer to transfer data over USB to your PC. You can also use the FPGA to extend the instruction set of your CPU. Imagine you are implementing a crypto processor. The data communication might require only a very small computing power but with rather complicated logic to handle flow control and buffering, while actual crypto needs some serious firepower. Just take a low power soft processor and add a couple of instructions that access custom FPGA blocks to do the encryption.
If you are really pinching your gates it may be more cost effective to use a separate microcontroller, but a soft CPU is a lot more flexible, especially with a prototyping board.
A board that will be available at Seeed is currently in the works.
Jack.
Since the Openbench LA is so closely related to the Butterfly, couldn’t this be ported to run on that too?