Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board

re: Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board by Former Member

Former Member — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:16:38 GMT

My attendance at this event will be influenced greatly by the cost of the development board. I have searched bothe Elektor and Element14 and am unable to find any information at all related to this particular development board. There was an FPGA development kit on Elektor store but it was over $1K. That would bump me.

re: Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board by Former Member

Former Member — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:15:50 GMT

Your are right.

Also I hope the quality of the video and the presenters will be good.Latests videos weren't very nice.

Elektor is a great magazine and I really want to see that quality here too.

re: Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board by Former Member

Former Member — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:47:45 GMT

@davbbley

We were notified by element14 about your question which we answered. Unfortunately it seems like they didn't post our reply.

To answer your question, the board will probably be sold for about €70 including taxes.

The reason why we chose to do it like this, hold a seminar first, publish later is because it is an experiment. We usually do it the other way around but this time we are interested to see what the results are if we do it like this.

@Michael Kellett

Our firmware is open source and the (basic)development software is free.

@Sebastian Rama

I regret to inform you that we don't have actors to do our webinars, you'll have to make due with engineers

Eventhough this will be my first webinar I will try my best.

re: Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board by Former Member

Former Member — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:03:33 GMT

Xilinx. What chip please? No, I'm not expecting the Zynq-7000. Is it Spartan-3A 200K in 100-pin package? MicroBlaze support? Max Code and Ram sizes? External bus then? DSP thanks to a fast 24bitx24bit multiplier-adder? USB-audio? Four I2S ports for interfacing multichannel audio Codecs? Price €70 including taxes may be an issue for the application I'm targeting, compared to a trivial Infineon XMC4000 "one chip" approach.

What would be the preferred application for such FPGA? I'm thinking about a dedicated coprocessor (like a FIR engine, DFT engine or FFT engine) hooked on SPI or I2S (cannot afford a parallel interface). For €70 (plus some RAM perhaps) it needs to deliver a lot more power than an extra Infineon XMC4000 clocked 120 MHz, or an extra Freescale DSP56K clocked at 250 MHz.

Of course there may be better suited applications like ultrafast neural neworks massively relying on registers, adders and comparators (say 10,000 of them), essentialy without multipliers. Would be nice to design a physical architecture basing on the Elektor FPGA board, enabling to hook identical boards in a simple 3D array consisting of several daughterboards (the 2D dimension) hooked in a mini-rack (the 3D dimension). To be programmed by a PC using a single USB connexion. PC application to optimally map (and split) the neural network to the particular physical 3D array. Is such cluster going to be significantly faster and cheaper than a single PC clocked at 3,000 MHz, seeing the whole neural network in his Ram, executing it sequentially?

I'm not critizing. I'm only trying giving you some inspiration, some perspectives, for the presentation.

re: Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board by sa-penguin

sa-penguin — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:54:31 GMT

Although the Spartan 3 series are a bit old, they are fine (I'd use the Spartan 6 LX 9 myself- still has a non-BGA package).

Releasing the details via a conference at 2AM? Not so great. I hope you release a copy of the conference afterwards, on Youtube.

Like Stephane, I'm looking for a dedicated processor. However, I'm also looking for something that can handle high speed data input (100Msps 14-bit ADC) and output (USB2 High Speed, HDMI, maybe even multiple Ethernet 100 ports for distributed network computing). The expensive Dev Kits resort to FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Connector) and daughter boards. The FMC handles signal rates over 3Gbps. Your specified chip tops out at about 450MHz, so you should get achieve a much cheaper design.

A good interface is like the difference between a Ferrari in a traffic jam - and cruising down an open freeway.

re: Elektor Academy - FPGA Development Board by Former Member

Former Member — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:33:19 GMT

Hi,

how can I return to attend this event? was recorded right?

Thanks,

Diogo