Dangerous Prototypes Open Source Hardware

spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

July 16, 2012, 10:06:28 am

Any plans to maybe make a s6/v6 version of obls with ddr2/3? Maybe a version that can take a standard ddr2 memory for laptop or desktop ... so that if for e.g. I have 512M of laptop ddr I can just plug it in or if I have 2G board ddr2 for desktop I just plug it in and get 2G of storage space? s6/v6 should be able to handle that without a problem, some 2232h for full speed communication with a pc ... v6/s6 can even do some  fancy compression (fancier then rle if required) but could also implement "noise" detection... and even maybe 1 or 2 analog channels?

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #1 – July 16, 2012, 10:08:59 am

Great Idea...but Eagle memory routing is gonna be a .....

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #2 – July 16, 2012, 10:48:59 am

[quote author="arakis"]Great Idea...but Eagle memory routing is gonna be a .....[/quote]

it's probably going to require 4 layer board, bga chip .. so might be a perfect opportunity to switch from eagle to kicad :D (or design the thing in Altium or Cadence and then redraw in kicad/eagle)

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #3 – July 16, 2012, 11:15:10 am

what a great waste of virtex 6 :-),
and the price would be like 10times higher,
and the debugging would be impossible,

It might be cheaper to buy some professional tool for cheaper.

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #4 – July 16, 2012, 11:22:10 am

virtex I added mostly as a joke, but spartan 6 ain't too expensive, we'r talking 20-30 bucks for a single device .... not so much more expensive then spartan 3.

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #5 – July 16, 2012, 01:58:06 pm

[quote author="arhi"]virtex I added mostly as a joke, but spartan 6 ain't too expensive, we'r talking 20-30 bucks for a single device .... not so much more expensive then spartan 3.[/quote]
actually spartan 6s can be found for $10 in the single packages, it's not the expensiveness of a singe device that's the problem, it's that that the largest hobby solder-able package they come in , is 144 tqfp, and that's nowhere near enough pins for DDR implementation...so only BGAs

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #6 – July 16, 2012, 02:10:11 pm

That's why I asked if DP is designing a new board :D. If I could find a good chip in 208 tqfp I'd try to do it myself (not sure 208 is enough for ddr2 also, they are 72pin modules iirc)

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #7 – July 17, 2012, 10:49:22 am

[font=Georgia:]Xilinx Zynq 70x0

arhi,
arakis,

If you decide to go to a BGA package, I suggest you skip the Xilinx Spartan 6 and go directly to a Xilinx Zynq 7010 or 7020 (link). That way you get a dual Cortex-A9, a bunch of useful peripherals, and a Xilinx Series 7 FPGA fabric. The price of the Xilinx Zynq 7010 is expected to be roughly $15 in volume.

How about combining the following items on an SO-DIMM card?

Xlinix Zynq 7010
two wide SDRAM devices
two wide Flash devices
micro SDcard
clock and reset
JTAG
power supply and sequencing
[/list]
Thanks for your time.

dsm[/font:]

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #8 – July 17, 2012, 11:29:29 am

I won't be going bga that's for sure. I can't solder it and I don't have anyone with pnp machine to solder it for me, nor I have experience ...

As for zynq, they promissed me samples - got nothing
they promissed me some dev kits - got nothing
I'm soon to think zynq was figment of my imagination :(

bastards, only thing the had to do is to ma one chip with 144 or 208 pins in tqfp and I'd love them forever ... even if they limited the peripheral buss to 50MHz It'll still be enough for 99% of uses for that chip .. but nooooooo they had to go with bga ... %@_)%*@#$%&@$#^_&$#%_)@#$(%*#%@&_%@

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #9 – July 17, 2012, 03:23:24 pm

Cortex-A9 dual core + fpga for an logic analyzer, are you serious ?  Why not develop own asic ?

I thinkg that pretty decent device can be made just by adding some RAM to the existing design. It just needs some time to think about it :-)

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #10 – July 17, 2012, 03:39:57 pm

ram requires pins, larger device (more pins) are already bga, then why not go with spartan6 that's faster and better :D and have direct support to some easily available ram strips (I think I have more then 4G ddr2 pc ram strips in the house collecting dust)
zynq is cool if they wanna supply on-offs for 15$ but I'm afraid that will never happen.

now we could add ram to spartan 3 device too .. (project I'm working on now as  I have some dev board with ddr2 and spartan3an) but no way to get 200mhz sampling on that

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #11 – July 17, 2012, 06:14:13 pm

And why not to just support DDR SDRAM @133MHz it is very cheap and can be done with a Spartan3.

Best Regards
Benjamin

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #12 – July 17, 2012, 06:46:31 pm

Hi,
I plan in a future project (work in progress secret project) to include a Logic Sniffer mode @100MHz with up to 16 channels and with at least 8MegaBytes of RAM for storage and with USB 2.0 High Speed for data transfer.
I think such configuration will be great for very long run sampling and also realtime analysis by mixing Saleae & Logic Sniffer mode depending on the needs of the user.

Tell me if you think about other features.

If forgot one stuff the price for the full board (which will features tons of other stuff) will be less than 100US$.

Best Regards
Benjamin

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #13 – July 17, 2012, 09:27:53 pm

The whole idea is to use ram that's used in PC as everyone has those modules lying around .. ddr1, 2, 3 .. yes they are long and have many pins but ..

Re: spartan/virtex 6 + ddr2/3 ?

Reply #14 – July 17, 2012, 10:17:10 pm

Jack is working on a spartan 6 Papilio board with sdram