Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Korhonen Timo <[email protected]> · Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:41:00 +0100

Lawrence T. Hoff wrote:

----------what fpga are you using for this? We looked at putting a power PC

core onto the FPGA, then we found out that this would not be supported on

their next generation FPGA. 
We use the Xilinx with the PPC440 core.
This is the second generation for Xilinx (previously PPC405 core).
I have heard the same rumors - the next generation is likely
to be ARM-based, not PPC-based.

This is more than a rumor - this article has more details:
http://www.edn.com/article/CA6702617.html?nid=3351&rid=9447059
For "serious" processing the embedded CPUs and microblaze are

pretty weak, even though you can run an IOC there (for connectivity).

In general, we try (or at least should try) to minimize the dependency
on the EDK

(embedded development kit) structures in our FPGA designs. Xilinx

tends to change the internal architecture pretty often.
In theory, that will be functionally equivalent (but require a
new tool chain).

In theory yes, but probably the internal bus structure etc. will once again

change. Ensuring portability of designs between Xilinx toolset versions
is not

their strongest point....
The long-term maintenance will then be the problem. You either invest a
lot to port

all the FPGA designs to recent platforms (as far as it goes - sometimes
it does not)

or have to maintain several versions of the tools ready to be used.
Timo

--

Timo Korhonen PSI (Paul Scherrer Institut, http://www.psi.ch)
CH-5232 Villigen PSI
tel + 41- 56 3103262 fax + 41 - 56 310 5090
e-mail: [email protected]

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System