RE: [N8VEM: 14647] 68008 SBC

["..I'd rather be coding ASM!" <uri...@deviate.fi>]

This is mostly a tyre-kicking exercise.

I keep watching (and playing) around with the N8VEM systems I've built 
(and love!) and a few others such as the V6Z80P which has a whopping great 
FPGA in the middle and a 20Mhz Z80. The V6Z80P is a wonderous machine. it 
has VGA+AV out, logically a chipset close to an Amiga ECS system with a 
blitter, 512kb ram, 512kb video ram, 128kb audio ram, 4-channel sterreo 
8bit sound etc.

I've often been a bit torn with how impressive some of the FPGA designs 
are yet how enjoyable the non-FPGA's are for their simplicity and ease of 
understanding balanced with obtainability of chips.

I was wondering, if people are thinking about using FPGA's for various 
"Advanced" designs, and other "complex chips", perhaps there should be a 
similar service to the "Here is your blank PCB" that 
Andrew/Doug/Sergey/$REST graciously provide where FPGA's are distributed 
on a mini-carrier board and have a community designed firmware update 
based upon a very small number of reference designs. Ie. Your v1SP3 
carrier chip/board can be used with this, that the other SBC project with 
different firmware.

For instance, say it was chosen that the Spartan-3 was to be the "common" 
FPGA used on a lot of projects. The chip is distributed at near 
cost+labour on a carrier board that can go onto the N8VEM project boards 
and there is for this small number of reference designs a simple serial 
programming method that hobbyists can use to reconfigure the FPGA as 
updates become available?

I've been thinking along these lines with the 68040SBC project that uses 
the QUICC chips and thinking "I'd desperately love to be able to build one 
of these but don't have the equipment to be able to attach one to the 
board."

So.. thoughts people? Perhaps a mini-board with the FPGA on it and a 
common set of pins underneath that can be socketed for break-out? I'm 
still not overly thrilled with the concept of FPGA's, but some projects 
are limited without custom ASIC's as many computers were with them even in 
the early 80's. (Spectrum ULA, various DEC J-11's when they moved 
from bitsliced processors ..etc).

Al.


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 Al Boyanich
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