Last time an FPGA design was getting me down, it was due to power consumption issues. We could get 4x the battery life with an ARM design as compared to the on-FPGA NEON processor cores we were using.
FPGA was super flexible, but what we really needed was a couple of ARMs and a tiny bit of programmable silicon for the actual custom bits.
At the lower end, there are the Cypress PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP chips. Those combine ARM cores with a small amount of programmable logic - not enough to constitute a full-blown FPGA but enough for many purposes. They are inexpensive, and all the digital I/O pins are not only 5V tolerant but 5V capable. (The processor core runs at 1.8V but the chips include level translation.)
"Spock, did you see the looks on their faces?"
"Yes, Captain, a sort of vacant contentment."
why? (Score:0)
why bother with an actual chip? there are plenty of open source microcontrollers you can use today with any number of FPGAs.
Re:why? (Score:3)
Last time an FPGA design was getting me down, it was due to power consumption issues. We could get 4x the battery life with an ARM design as compared to the on-FPGA NEON processor cores we were using.
FPGA was super flexible, but what we really needed was a couple of ARMs and a tiny bit of programmable silicon for the actual custom bits.
Re: (Score:2)