M
M. Noone
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Hi - I was considering th possibility of replacing a microcontroller
(Atmel atmega168) with an FPGA. I realized that an FPGA would be much
better suited for the application. The only FPGA work I've ever done
was with the popular Xilinx Spartan3 board. I started looking for a
suitable replacement chip - and I quickly ran into an issue: all FPGAs
are huge! A search at digi-key of 'FPGA TQFP' found chips with 100 pins
and more - nothing less. Such a large chip won't even physically fit on
this board. So - can anybody explain what I'm missing here? Is it that
FPGAs are normally designed to run with external memory, so they need a
large bus for that? I am aware of the smaller BGA FPGAs, but I don't
have the equipment to produce FPGA boards.
Thanks,
-Mike
(Atmel atmega168) with an FPGA. I realized that an FPGA would be much
better suited for the application. The only FPGA work I've ever done
was with the popular Xilinx Spartan3 board. I started looking for a
suitable replacement chip - and I quickly ran into an issue: all FPGAs
are huge! A search at digi-key of 'FPGA TQFP' found chips with 100 pins
and more - nothing less. Such a large chip won't even physically fit on
this board. So - can anybody explain what I'm missing here? Is it that
FPGAs are normally designed to run with external memory, so they need a
large bus for that? I am aware of the smaller BGA FPGAs, but I don't
have the equipment to produce FPGA boards.
Thanks,
-Mike