SparkFun Electronics Forum

My company would be interested in an easily addressable / accessible SRAM. I would suggest that you offer just the programmed FPGA and memory chip for those who want to incorporate it in their own product. Sure I could do write my own VHDL and everything, but for a low volume product it's better to pay sparkfun $5 for something that is tested. But we wouldn't find a big DIP package particularly attractive.

Hi - FPGA's actually can't be "programmed" - or at least not the ones I'm familiar with; they need an external configuration prom to boot from.

It definitely would be more than $5 - the cost of the SDRAM + FPGA in low quantities is much more than that.

Cheers,

--David Carne

To build on my earlier post, my immediate need is for a simple way to take ADC data at about 250Khz sample rate, and store it off to RAM as simply as possible. SPI or I2C works equally well for me. After sampling, the processor would access the data processing. I need quick capture and store, processing is not time critical. I'm not convinced that I can do this well enough using flash (speed and limit on the number of times I can write to the flash). Philba's suggestion of backing up the processor is another good application for this type of product. Any video aspects would not be a big selling point to me, and I hope that it wouldn't add significantly to the cost.

I will be following this discussion, and hopefully, I can save myself some effort of rolling my own solution!

Until this board actually does get produced, an alternative that I am using in my thesis project is FIFOs from IDT. They best used when put in a parallel bus (i.e., your ADC has parallel outs opposed to SPI or I2C). The only thing that sucks about these chips is that they are rather pricey. The tradeoff is that they are very, very fast, though.

brennen wrote:...an alternative that I am using in my thesis project is FIFOs from IDT. They best used when put in a parallel bus (i.e., your ADC has parallel outs opposed to SPI or I2C).

Thanks for the tip. Parallel isn't a deal killer, it only slightly limits my choices in ADC, although high speed serial would be my choice. A big factor is memory capacity. I'd need somewhere between 32-64mb (by 16 bits) at least. It doesn't look like IDT has anything that big unless the devices can be daisy chained (I haven't checked the data sheets yet).

Hi David, No activity on this thread for a while. Are you still pursuing this idea? I found this via google when entered "sdram look like SRAM"

Glenn