DARNAW! - PGA Style FPGA Module

Finally first picture of Darnaw1 our PGA style FPGA board is here here
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.html. More information on
pricing and spec in the next couple of days will appear on the
website. Those with eagle eyes can work it out the spec from the
picture.

First shipments will have 16Mbit SPI flash to allow programming of the
FPGA but also to act as a code store for processors like MicroBlaze
implemented within the FPGA. There is also SDRAM on board. Small
numbers of this product will be available to ship next week.

We would be interested to have feedback on this product and what you
like, and what we could improve on this product and the related series
of products we have planned.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

"John Adair" <g1@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:1177070132.270147.235340@b75g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> Finally first picture of Darnaw1 our PGA style FPGA board is here here
> http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.html. More information on
> pricing and spec in the next couple of days will appear on the
> website. Those with eagle eyes can work it out the spec from the
> picture.
>
> We would be interested to have feedback on this product and what you
> like, and what we could improve on this product and the related series
> of products we have planned.
>
> John Adair
>
Hi John,
There was some bloke on here a while back asking about this sort of product, 
I pointed him at your DIP design. Craigsomething?
So, you reckon it'll work in a wire-wrap system!? I wish you luck supporting 
that SI hellhole. :-) Although, can you buy wirewrap boards with ground 
planes now?
Also, the capacitor packs you're using, are they interdigitated ones? I'm 
interested on what other folks are using for bypass networks these days. 
It'd be nice to find someone else who's had experience of the X2Y caps that 
were discussed here a few weeks back.
Finally, I hope you ripped off Xilinx's sparse chevron thingy for your 
pinout. It'll be a big help for your SI.
Cheers, Syms.
p.s. 'ripped off' <-> 'were inspired by' ;-) 

Symon

I don't know about wirewrap boards with ground availability but one of
our thoughts with this product was the user that likes 2-4 layer low
technology pcb boards they can assemble themselves. With this product
we allow them to stay with the board technology they like but they can
have a high performance bga based FPGA in their system. I have seen
wirewrap sockets I believe from Mill-Max or Precidip if someone wants
to do that.

The capacitors are just conventional arrays as used throughout our
product range. We have gone to the effort of making the board itself
resiliant in terms of SSI but there is a limit given the target market
and where it is likely to be used. If someone is after very high
performance I would always integrate the FPGA into a complete board.
We do often take one of our standard products as a starting point and
produce a customer specific design from it.

The Craignell modules are sort of complimentary to the Darnaw range
but are much smaller in I/O and differ in other ways. These are also
now shipping. Darnaw1 can be a very serious processing capability with
it's I/O resources and onboard SDRAM and FLASH. We may uprate the
SDRAM to DDR2 in issue2 but that is still to be decided. For those
familiar with our OVERCOAT series it is also possible to use this
technique to stack DARNAW1's if you have a reason to do so.

I am hoping that a lot of products we have planned will make it to
market this year given our slow output of our own product range last
year. The engineering team has now grown very substantially and some
resource is now going back to our own product developments. I think
some of the things we are doing right now might even surprise a few
people but I will leave the detail as something of tease and a
surprise to come.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.


On 20 Apr, 13:43, "Symon" <symon_bre...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "John Adair" <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote in message
>
> news:1177070132.270147.235340@b75g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...> Finally first picture of Darnaw1 our PGA style FPGA board is here here
> >http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.html. More information on
> > pricing and spec in the next couple of days will appear on the
> > website. Those with eagle eyes can work it out the spec from the
> > picture.


>
> > We would be interested to have feedback on this product and what you
> > like, and what we could improve on this product and the related series
> > of products we have planned.
>
> > John Adair
>
> Hi John,
> There was some bloke on here a while back asking about this sort of product,
> I pointed him at your DIP design. Craigsomething?
> So, you reckon it'll work in a wire-wrap system!? I wish you luck supporting
> that SI hellhole. :-) Although, can you buy wirewrap boards with ground
> planes now?
> Also, the capacitor packs you're using, are they interdigitated ones? I'm
> interested on what other folks are using for bypass networks these days.
> It'd be nice to find someone else who's had experience of the X2Y caps that
> were discussed here a few weeks back.
> Finally, I hope you ripped off Xilinx's sparse chevron thingy for your
> pinout. It'll be a big help for your SI.
> Cheers, Syms.
> p.s. 'ripped off' <-> 'were inspired by' ;-)

John Adair wrote:
> Finally first picture of Darnaw1 our PGA style FPGA board is here here
> http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.html. More information on
> pricing and spec in the next couple of days will appear on the
> website. Those with eagle eyes can work it out the spec from the
> picture.

Are all the components shown - no photo of the rear ?

Does the PGA plug into the side we see, or the other side ?
[and the side we see is for probing - but not labelled ? ]

-jg

On Apr 20, 8:31 am, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:
 I don't know about wirewrap boards with ground availability but one
of
 our thoughts with this product was the user that likes 2-4 layer low
 technology pcb boards they can assemble themselves. With this product
 we allow them to stay with the board technology they like but they
can
 have a high performance bga based FPGA in their system. I have seen
 wirewrap sockets I believe from Mill-Max or Precidip if someone wants
 to do that.

John
I've used wire-wrap boards that had plated-thru holes and copper
planes on each side.  They're made by Twin Industries and I bought
them from DigiKey.  I use the bottom plane for ground and the top
plane for VCC.  On the bottom I solder a 1206 cap from the power pin
of a chip's socket to the gound plane.  I run my wires between pins as
if I was laying out a PCB and I DO NOT bundle the wire-wrap wires!  I
also make sure that I run the wires up against the ground plane to
reduce wire inductance and ringing.  I've had no problems running
40MHz clocks with 74HCT logic and Xilinx CPLDs (on home-made adapters)
with this method.   But I think that wire-wrapping a PGA device would
be pushing it.

-Dave Pollum

Hi,

Dave Pollum wrote:
> But I think that wire-wrapping a PGA device would be pushing it.

http://www.fpga-games.com/images/game_top.jpg
http://www.fpga-games.com/images/game_bot.jpg

The Xilinx FPGA is a PG191.  Some of us just don't know when to stop!
Eric 

Jim

What you see on the current photo are the solder joints of a double
ended pin so the pins come out the bottom as currently done. Given we
don't need to meet a specific pinout we could take them out the top if
someone need one that way or even have a socket + pin assembly like we
use in out OVERCOAT arrays. We can also make these with an un-
populated header and this could be a lot cheaper for high numbers used
in production say in a low pin count application.

The PGA pin header is not cheap either to purchase or even to assemble
so I would recommend anyone with a specific interest that would want a
a few+ should come and talk to us. We can deal with Bill of of
Materials variants for 5-10+ shipping units and can even be economic
on a customised pcb variant of any of our products in fairly small
numbers (say 25+ off on a small product like this). Our development
board products really are only a demo of what we can do and supply
ideas to be used in a mix and match fashion on customer specific
designs.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 20 Apr, 20:58, Jim Granville <no.s...@designtools.maps.co.nz>
wrote:
> John Adair wrote:
> > Finally first picture of Darnaw1 our PGA style FPGA board is here here
> >http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.html. More information on
> > pricing and spec in the next couple of days will appear on the
> > website. Those with eagle eyes can work it out the spec from the
> > picture.
>
> Are all the components shown - no photo of the rear ?
>
> Does the PGA plug into the side we see, or the other side ?
> [and the side we see is for probing - but not labelled ? ]
>
> -jg

The biggest issue with wire wrap is the time to do it reliably. The on-
board regulators and decoupling make the board less prone to poor
performance of input power supply. It most commercial applications it
is probably cheaper and quicker to knock up a low tech pcb to support
the module if you need a large percentage of the I/O. But for those
that like wire wrapping or don't have an easy path to making a pcb
wire wrap is a possibility. I have seen some very complex boards made
in wire wrap but not in recent years due to the economics.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 20 Apr, 21:40, Dave Pollum <vze24...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Apr 20, 8:31 am, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:
>  I don't know about wirewrap boards with ground availability but one
> of
>  our thoughts with this product was the user that likes 2-4 layer low
>  technology pcb boards they can assemble themselves. With this product
>  we allow them to stay with the board technology they like but they
> can
>  have a high performance bga based FPGA in their system. I have seen
>  wirewrap sockets I believe from Mill-Max or Precidip if someone wants
>  to do that.
>
> John
> I've used wire-wrap boards that had plated-thru holes and copper
> planes on each side.  They're made by Twin Industries and I bought
> them from DigiKey.  I use the bottom plane for ground and the top
> plane for VCC.  On the bottom I solder a 1206 cap from the power pin
> of a chip's socket to the gound plane.  I run my wires between pins as
> if I was laying out a PCB and I DO NOT bundle the wire-wrap wires!  I
> also make sure that I run the wires up against the ground plane to
> reduce wire inductance and ringing.  I've had no problems running
> 40MHz clocks with 74HCT logic and Xilinx CPLDs (on home-made adapters)
> with this method.   But I think that wire-wrapping a PGA device would
> be pushing it.
>
> -Dave Pollum

On Apr 20, 6:32 pm, "Eric Crabill" <eric.crab...@xilinx.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Dave Pollum wrote:
> > But I think that wire-wrapping a PGA device would be pushing it.
>
> http://www.fpga-games.com/images/game_top.jpghttp://www.fpga-games.com/images/game_bot.jpg
>
> The Xilinx FPGA is a PG191.  Some of us just don't know when to stop!
> Eric


Eric;
I'm impressed.
-Dave Pollum

Excellent product!   This is perfect for our needs.  We usually make 2-4 
layer boards but don't want to deal with BGA.

Keep up the great work!

What kind of quantities are available?  This would be really cool with a 
Virtex 4 device (one with a power PC built in!)



John Adair wrote:
> Jim
> 
> What you see on the current photo are the solder joints of a double
> ended pin so the pins come out the bottom as currently done. Given we
> don't need to meet a specific pinout we could take them out the top if
> someone need one that way or even have a socket + pin assembly like we
> use in out OVERCOAT arrays. We can also make these with an un-
> populated header and this could be a lot cheaper for high numbers used
> in production say in a low pin count application.
> 
> The PGA pin header is not cheap either to purchase or even to assemble
> so I would recommend anyone with a specific interest that would want a
> a few+ should come and talk to us. We can deal with Bill of of
> Materials variants for 5-10+ shipping units and can even be economic
> on a customised pcb variant of any of our products in fairly small
> numbers (say 25+ off on a small product like this). Our development
> board products really are only a demo of what we can do and supply
> ideas to be used in a mix and match fashion on customer specific
> designs.
> 
> John Adair
> Enterpoint Ltd.
> 
> On 20 Apr, 20:58, Jim Granville <no.s...@designtools.maps.co.nz>
> wrote:
>> John Adair wrote:
>>> Finally first picture of Darnaw1 our PGA style FPGA board is here here
>>> http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.html. More information on
>>> pricing and spec in the next couple of days will appear on the
>>> website. Those with eagle eyes can work it out the spec from the
>>> picture.
>> Are all the components shown - no photo of the rear ?
>>
>> Does the PGA plug into the side we see, or the other side ?
>> [and the side we see is for probing - but not labelled ? ]
>>
>> -jg
> 
>