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Message
From: bootstrap at hawaii.rr.com<bootstrap@h...>
Date: Sun Jul 29 20:16:37 CEST 2007
Subject: [oc] Help with choosing a FPGA
Greetings and Aloha,I too am just starting my first hardware design that needs
an FPGA, and have so-far decided cyclone3 or spartan3e
are the appropriate choices. My design needs to capture
images from a Micron MT9P001 5 megapixel CMOS sensor
at 96 megapixels per second (at 12-bits per pixel). This
sounds suspiciously like your application - except in my
case I need to send the image across a gigabit ethernet
cable (except not to save images on my PC). Therefore,
your project and mine seem very similar and I would like
to see whether you want to combine efforts. I have
designed dozens of electronics devices over the years,
including CPUs, embedded controllers and devices, and
so forth --- but somehow have always evaded the need
to design with FPGAs. However, my luck has run out on
this design effort it seems, though most FPGAs are *FAR*
too expensive to consider. The cyclone3 and spartan3e
seem plausible at $10 to $20 for the smaller devices in
those families. Because their I/O pins are only capable
of 200 to 625 megahertz, we cannot implement the
serial part of the gigabit ethernet in the FPGA. But we
can adopt $3 ~ $20 gigabit ethernet serdes/transceiver
chips from TI/national/marvell/others - but the cheaper
ones input and output 10bit 8b10b encoded data, which
we must encode and decode in our FPGA to adopt them.
To put a 1Ge or 10Ge serdes/transceiver in an FPGA
requires we choose one of their expensive families, which
are ***VASTLY*** more expensive (as in $250 ~ $400).
The cost to build my product needs to be as close to $25
per camera as I can manage, including 5Mpixel sensor,
lens, FPGA, transceivers, connectors, housing, etc.
This is in moderate quantities (10K to 1M units per year).
Hope this helps. Contact me by email if you wish.
Regards,
bootstrap -at- hawaii.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: a2e at insight.rr.com<a2e@i...>
To:
Date: Fri Jul 27 08:04:52 CEST 2007
Subject: [oc] Help with choosing a FPGA
> Let me start off by saying that I am sorry if some of my questions
> seem a bit basic, but my knowledge of FPGA’s is limited to a few
> classes I took back when I was in school.
> My ultimate goal is to capture data from a CMOS image sensor and
> store it to hard drive. The CMOS sensor itself will either be clock out
> data at a frequency of 48Mhz or 96Mhz. My first question is how can
> I tell if a particular FPGA is capable of reading in data at these rates?
> I have looked over various datasheets but I have to admit I have not
> been able to find a straight answer.
> The 2 devboards I am looking at are the “Spartan 3E Starter Board”
> from Dililent or the “Cyclone II FPGA Starter Development Kit” from
> Altrea. Would either of these boards be capable of doing what I need?
> As for cores I am thinking that I will need to run the following:
> OpenRISC 1200
> General-Purpose I/O (GPIO) Core
> I2C controller core
> tri-mode Ethernet MAC
> VGA/LCD Controller
> OCIDEC (OpenCores IDE Controller)
> Does any of this sound reasonable for the boards I mentioned above
> or do I need to go back to the drawing board?
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