What are you using FPGAs for?

I'm currently integrating an FPGA into a space insturmentation design. For low power, realtime applications they can't be beat. There great for robustness also, you don't have to worry about things changing or crashing. BTW the FPGA is an Actel 600 gate nano.

How do you like the Nano?  The density and package size is interesting to me.  I've been thinking about trying them out, but I'm reluctant to purchase yet another programming cable.

They are good for connecting logic, but not for DSP applications... they are good for low power applications, ours only draws ~15mA @12mHz and were  using 300k gates (half)

They are good for connecting logic, but not for DSP applications... they are good for low power applications, ours only draws ~15mA @12mHz and were  using 300k gates (half)

I agree. We can not compare a microprocessor specifically designed as a DSP with a FPGA. FPGA has many advantages in relation to a DSP and also has disadvantages. Depending on application we can use  a FPGA and get the best it can offer. All of it depends on good sense. We can not forget one great advantage: miniaturization !

I think you are  a little out of touch - FPGAs can offer truly amazing DSP performance - outclassing DSP chips by a huge margin. eg "The Virtex-6 FPGA family provides up to 2,016 DSP48 slices that deliver over 1000 GMACS of DSP processing performance",

There are no single chip DSPs that can come close.

Obviously such performance comes at a cost in money and in power and is certainly not suitable for a great many applications.

you started disagreeing and it ended up agreeing that there are advantages and disadvantages. Very good ! Finally, at the end you gave some advantages and disadvantages.

It depends on the application and the cost involved. If you had read item 5 ("there are some applications where the use of microcontrollers/microprocessors is useless. When we need to process various signals in a short time (few nanoseconds) in parallel. The best choice: FPGA"), would understand exactly what I was trying to explain. Undoubtedly, FPGA is more powerful than any microprocessor / microcontroller but there is a cost to pay. The cost benefit depends on your application.

I think my comment was accidently (by me) linked to yours - it was actually in response to "They are good for connecting logic, but not for DSP applications" from someone else.

No problem my friend. After all we are in place for discussions. I think your reply would be to Burrguy (item 15).

He said exactly what you mentioned !

And I disagree with him too.

me want to use it for cracking and so but got no cores , ill appreciate any help and guidance alot.

JudeLEE - the OpenCores site is a good start:

http://opencores.org/projects

They have quite a selection of crypto cores for download. There are also quite a lot of research papers on the web - you could try e.g. IEEEXplore (but need to have the access to their article datatbase). The research papers tend to be quite general though.

Open cores is pretty good, Actel (now microsemi) has some cores built into libero. You can put an 8051 or other microprocessors on your FPGA and then use I2C,SPI ect cores for connecting logic.

@burrguy - I'm puzzled as to why you might want to put an 8051 into an FPGA. I can understand why you might put one of the FPGA vendors tiny processors in but if I want an 8051 I can buy a nice one with good peripherals pretty cheaply. Most of my FPGA projects use an ARM or similar micro connected to the FPGA - that way I can divide the task up and give different parts to the hardware best able to handle it.

Have you actually used the opencores 8051 (or similar) and if so how well did it work ?

About OpenCores I would like to know if any of you knows a tutorial on how to use a module/core from OpenCores together with LatticeMico32.

How do I put it together with the Wishbone?

Thomas