FPGA info from Embedded World 2004/Nuerrnberg

Embedded World 2004. Nuernberg, Review:

First impression, FPGA vendors had very little presence there.
Altera Xilinx, Triscend, Lattice where there, but in really small booths.

Altera: the Quartus Suite CD was available for immediate pick-up, this CD
should containt all the tools to work with NIOS evaluation version (Altera
webdownloads do not include NIOS eval ASFAIK at the moment). Quartus 4 web
edition is due soon.

Xilinx: booth was so boring for me that didnt spend any time at all there.
Tried to get Spartan 3 info, only answer was that Xilinx shipped S3 samples
to disties last week.

Triscend, they had some new (for me) A7 family demos, thats a FPGA with MAC,
USB, A/D converters.

MIND had ML300 board to show, so I was able to demonstrate MicroBlaze
booting uClinux from CompactFlash at least for one person :), Mind seems to
be a little disappointed with the regard to the use of Linux on Virtex2Pro,
as Xilinx is only pushing Montavista and seems to ignore all the other
players.

Atmel: new FPGA configuration memories (new for me, maybe all others know
them), also MMC cards with Dataflash serial memories, so ideal bootstrap
media for FPGAs. Atmel has some ideas of having new MCU+FPGA style of
products, but nothing known what they will be. I repeated my plea to have:

* RISC + self programmable flash
* small FPGA (mcu reprogrammable)
* all packages from SO-8 to TQFP-100
lets see if the make this.
(I told Microchip that I like MCU in SO-8, and they did it, but forgetting
to pay royalties)

SSV had the demo of the NIOS -ucLinux module in DIP64 "package" it is
available only as development kit at $999 at the end of march.

Parallax had their Cyclone and Statix modules they do look qute not only on
pictures.

There was a company advertizing USB OTG IP Core, and they had a PHYTEC
compatible module with OTG support. And the guy at that boot was 100% that
the board has Xilinx FPGA and USB OTG PHY on the board. When I told it is
impossible, we looked at the board and found ISP1362, so there was no USB
PHY - as there is none shipping yet (except ISP1301 that is not obtainable).

USB OTG: tried to hard to squeeze the info from Philips - result: ISP1504
samples should be available from end of march. (all other info is under NDA
or Adopters agreement only). Motorola also had a OTG demo but that was also
using ISP1362. Motorola did promise MUCs with OTG.

Protel: the NEXUS was there, but CD was not available, I had to enter my
info and was promised that they send the CD. The Nexus evaluation version
should be fully working (30 days) except the functions that work with
hardware. Those it should be possible to evaluate the IP cores and see how
the SOC builder works etc...


maybe there was more FPGA "news" but I did not have so much time, as I was
primarily looking for a job, as my work contract ends on 31.03.2004

antti
www.openchip.org