4 ms·
Sidenote: LiteX is awesome. Knowing next to nothing about it, I was able to create a customized system-on-chip with RiscV CPU, several SPI/UART/I2C buses, load
by fest 6y ago
Sidenote: LiteX is awesome. Knowing next to nothing about it, I was able to create a customized system-on-chip with RiscV CPU, several SPI/UART/I2C buses, load it on a devboard and blink some LEDs in an evening or two.
The resulting Socs have been shown to boot Linux (albeit, slowly).
- elcritch 6y agoThat's impressive, and could lower the cost of entry for a lot of hardware projects.
- fest 6y agoI don't see it as lowering the cost of entry much (i.e. FPGA chip with reasonable number of gates for Linux is on the order of 50EUR/pc, and general purpose CPU performance is not even remotely close to, let's say Allwinner or Rockchip ARM SoC), but as something that either opens up new possibilities as a whole (for example, a trusted computing platform, where you can actually verify that no backdoors exist- see https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5971 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5971 ) or something that provides unprecedented flexibility in the future proofness of embedded designs: for example when you realize that you need another UART in a product that's been shipping for 5 years, and the MCU family you have been using just does not have the part you need. I am particularly excited about the hardware flexibility- it seems a very good platform for scientific/engineering instrumentation (LiteX actually seems to be conceived because of this niche).
- elcritch 6y ago> I am particularly excited about the hardware flexibility- it seems a very good platform for scientific/engineering instrumentation (LiteX actually seems to be conceived because of this niche). That's doubly exciting! Yes it's great to see new possibilities opening up. The cost reduction I mean is the lowering the development costs for custom platforms. If you need a team of expert hardware designers to design this stuff then most labs/small companies will be "priced out" of that arena.
- fest 6y agoOh yes, it can bring the cost of design and development down, agreed.
- pjc50 6y agoThat's an unfortunately heavily overloaded name, the FPGA builder is way down the search results behind the football club and the swimwear vendor.