Seeking FPGA and 8MB SDRAM in a PCMCIA Type I card

I'm looking to do some experiments with FPGAs, but I work solely on my 
Mac PowerBook laptop and I don't really have an easy place to keep an 
exposed FPGA development board lying around (I live on a sailboat).  So 
it would be nice if I could find a simple FPGA experimentation kit.  My 
PowerBook has a PCMCIA slot that I'm not using, so I thought that there 
must be some FPGA with at least 8MB of SDRAM packaged as a Type I PCMCIA 
card that I could use.  I've searched high and low for what seems to me 
to be an obvious product to no avail.  So, my question is, has anyone 
seen such a thing?  If so, where can I find one?

thanks,

-greg

There is a list of FPGA board at
  http://www.fpga-faq.com/FPGA_Boards.shtml
(Thanks Philip.)

The only mention of PCMCIA is Annapolis Micro Systems
  http://www.annapmicro.com/

You have another set of problems.  Where are you going to
get software that runs on a Mac?


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Gregory Burd wrote:
> I'm looking to do some experiments with FPGAs, but I work solely on my 
> Mac PowerBook laptop and I don't really have an easy place to keep an 
> exposed FPGA development board lying around (I live on a sailboat).

A sailboat would be a good place to learn HDL simulation.
Here's one for Mac OS X:
http://www.gmvhdl.com/mac-dv.html

          -- Mike Treseler

Thanks Hal and Philip.  That Annapolis Micro Wildcard-II 
(http://www.annapmicro.com/wildcard2.html) seems like the beast I was 
looking for.  Windows and Linux drivers.  If the Linux drivers are open 
source it won't be hard for me to port it to Mac OS/X.  The driver kit 
is fairly straight forward.  With that I should be able to talk to it, 
poke around a bit.  As for development software, gee I don't know. 
Anyone have suggestions?  I'm really just starting out in hardware 
design.  I've been in software land for 15 years professionally.  I've 
been looking for a challenge and I saw the empty PCMCIA slot on my Mac 
and said, "Hey, I wonder what fun new interesting thing I could plug in 
there and learn about?"  FPGAs have always been very interesting to me, 
so a few seconds later I launched my quest.  I'm a fan of very high 
level languages (lisp, Erlang, etc) and yet I've done a lot of work at 
the C and assembly levels so I'm really interested to see how far I can 
get toward making a tool like the Wildcard-II available to the general 
user via say Io (www.iolanguage.com).  I'm very curious about async 
logic design and non-von Neumann computer architectures.  I know, I know 
I'm in way over my head.  But that's the fun part, right?

cheers, any additional help always appreciated.

-greg

Mike Treseler wrote:
> Gregory Burd wrote:
> 
>> I'm looking to do some experiments with FPGAs, but I work solely on my 
>> Mac PowerBook laptop and I don't really have an easy place to keep an 
>> exposed FPGA development board lying around (I live on a sailboat).
> 
> 
> A sailboat would be a good place to learn HDL simulation.
> Here's one for Mac OS X:
> http://www.gmvhdl.com/mac-dv.html
> 
>          -- Mike Treseler

Thanks Mike.  Its Winter here in Boston so I have to keep the brain 
moving so it won't freeze up.  This looks like a good exercise to do 
just that.

-greg

"Gregory Burd" <gburd@sleepycat.com> wrote in message
news:10sbag6rstknjcd@corp.supernews.com...
> Thanks Hal and Philip.  That Annapolis Micro Wildcard-II
> (http://www.annapmicro.com/wildcard2.html) seems like the beast I was
> looking for.  Windows and Linux drivers.  If the Linux drivers are open
> source it won't be hard for me to port it to Mac OS/X.  The driver kit
> is fairly straight forward.  With that I should be able to talk to it,
> poke around a bit.  As for development software, gee I don't know.
> Anyone have suggestions?  I'm really just starting out in hardware
> design.  I've been in software land for 15 years professionally.  I've
> been looking for a challenge and I saw the empty PCMCIA slot on my Mac
> and said, "Hey, I wonder what fun new interesting thing I could plug in
> there and learn about?"  FPGAs have always been very interesting to me,
> so a few seconds later I launched my quest.  I'm a fan of very high
> level languages (lisp, Erlang, etc) and yet I've done a lot of work at
> the C and assembly levels so I'm really interested to see how far I can
> get toward making a tool like the Wildcard-II available to the general
> user via say Io (www.iolanguage.com).  I'm very curious about async
> logic design and non-von Neumann computer architectures.  I know, I know
> I'm in way over my head.  But that's the fun part, right?

Might be interesting having a look at the Celoxica offering - C-ish program
compiled to FPGA (I think it's C with fiddly bits to describe the
parallelism in hardware design).

...
>user via say Io (www.iolanguage.com).  I'm very curious about async 
>logic design and non-von Neumann computer architectures.  I know, I know 
>I'm in way over my head.  But that's the fun part, right?
>
>cheers, any additional help always appreciated.

All the stuff you mentioned is very high level.  If you want to run
something on your PCMCIA card, you need the low level tools, and I
don't know of anything that runs on the MAC.

The low level place-and-route tools are roughly the assembler
part of a compiler/assembler combination.

You might consider taking a 1-day intro class or find a friend
who has the tools installed and will help you get started.

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The suespammers.org mail server is located in California.  So are all my
other mailboxes.  Please do not send unsolicited bulk e-mail or unsolicited
commercial e-mail to my suespammers.org address or any of my other addresses.
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.

Gregory Burd wrote:
>
> so I thought that there must be some FPGA with at least
> 8MB of SDRAM packaged as a Type I PCMCIA card
>
In the close-but-no-cigar category (type II), see also:
http://www.comblock.com/download/com1300.pdf
Type II PCMCIA/Cardbus, XC3S400, 32 Mb SDRAM, $295 USD

Brian

Stephen Maudsley wrote:

> Might be interesting having a look at the Celoxica offering - C-ish program
> compiled to FPGA (I think it's C with fiddly bits to describe the
> parallelism in hardware design).
> 
> 

Interesting thought.  You're suggesting that I take the Io runtime and 
compile it using this tool?  Interesting idea.

-greg

Hal Murray wrote:
> ....
> 
>>user via say Io (www.iolanguage.com).  I'm very curious about async 
>>logic design and non-von Neumann computer architectures.  I know, I know 
>>I'm in way over my head.  But that's the fun part, right?
>>
>>cheers, any additional help always appreciated.
> 
> 
> All the stuff you mentioned is very high level.  If you want to run
> something on your PCMCIA card, you need the low level tools, and I
> don't know of anything that runs on the MAC.
> 
> The low level place-and-route tools are roughly the assembler
> part of a compiler/assembler combination.
> 
> You might consider taking a 1-day intro class or find a friend
> who has the tools installed and will help you get started.
> 

Hal,

	Good advise.  Part of my goal is to somehow make it possible for those 
using Mac OS/X to do FPGA development.  Seems like a rich untapped market.

-greg