Author: Keith Evans
Date: 09:30:16 04/10/03
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On April 10, 2003 at 08:07:22, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On April 09, 2003 at 21:02:18, Keith Evans wrote: > >>Some points: >> >>1 - SDRAM (or whatever) is way cheaper than Xilinx parts. If you cared about >>this, you could either offer it as an upgrade option, or let people upgrade >>themselves. (The standard practice would be to require a special DIMM so you >>could charge extra.) > >DDR ram is not too slow, but the problem is to interface to it in a cheap way. >how are you going to do that? Every interface eats money to license it. > >Further we do not speak about ASIC here but FPGA. How to interface memory >cheaply to FPGA? Are you worried about IP core licensing fees? It's not difficult to build a memory controller. You can even download some app notes from the Xilinx webpage, but be prepared to fix bugs if you use those. We built a digital data recorder (40 mbit/s stream) using a Xilinx SDRAM app note as a basis and it worked out fine in an older Virtex part. I've found that for simple interfaces it's usually easier to do it yourself than to license IP cores. I did a lot of work with video RAM early in my career (which wass just old async DRAM + shift register), so I know how to read memory datasheets. Keith
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