[Hardware] Fully unrolled RC5 on FPGA

[Martin Klingensmith]

Hi Ben,
It is my opinion that, with the chip costing around $400, the board
should at least be very versatile as in this case it represents perhaps
10% of the cost of the chip itself. Therefore if you have a $400 FPGA
attached to a computer through a USB interface, it doesn't seem very
versatile to me if I want to use it for an application requiring high
bandwidth. You may say it doesn't make a difference but if it's not that
hard to add a PCI interface then there isn't a reason not to do it. The
interface for USB could be an option in addition to the PCI.
If people were to make boards available on a not for profit or low
profit basis then the sale quantity could go up, further reducing the
cost for everyone regardless of which application they want it for.
This is just my opinion of course. Nobody even said they want to tackle
the job of designing a board.
--
Martin K

Ben Payne wrote:
> Maybe I'm missing something here but I've always envisioned a much "simpler" hardware design.  I've not been envisioning high speed needed between the PC and the FPGA.  So I was thinking USB as the interface.  To keep that even simpler I was thinking of using a USB capable PIC micro controller for the bus interface, and either serial or parallel communication to the FPGA.  Add some serial eeprom and a few connections for JTAG/download (to help debugging the system).  In a production system FPGA firmware could be downloaded via the USB interface.
>
> -> Ben
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