[sdiy] New cheap FPGA development system

[Eric Brombaugh]

Harry Bissell Jr wrote:
> Iplayed with this system yesterday at a Xilinx
> training class.  Its pretty cool... but I don't know
> if it is fast enough for a hardware synth.
>   

It's got a 50MHz oscillator on-board and the DCM blocks in the FPGA can 
be used to multiply that by up to 32x. The part on this board is a -4 
speed grade with internal flip-flops that are rated for at least 200MHz. 
With 20 18x18 multipliers, that works out to 4Gmults/sec.

How fast do you think a hardware synth needs to be able to run (and what 
constitutes a reasonable hardware synth capability)?

Just curious. :)

Eric