[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Dave McGuire wrote:
>    Well all my hardware work has been personal projects for the past ten
> years or so, up until ~2 years ago when I started doing it full-time
> for work (though still physically at home)...so up until recently it's
> just been lots of microcontrollers and 7400-series logic.

Once you go FPGA... you never go back. Trust me, it is amazing the amount
of stuff you can get done with an FPGA, the problem is that nowadays is a
bit of a pain in the ass to do any at home desing because high speed board
layout and prototyping is just out of my "budget" and most of the recent
parts are geared towards Ball Grid Arrays or other surface mounted stuff.
I.e. most of the FPGAs you are bound to use are not socket oriented...

>    I really dig CPLDs so far.  I'm going to try some FPGA stuff soon (I
> have an Xess board that I'm dicking with) to become more familiar with
> the capabilities and tools, though I don't anticipate using any FPGAs
> in my current "job" work, but I might do some bigger personal stuff
> with them.  Some of which I might just want to draft you for, as a
> matter of fact!

LOL, any time... :)

Reconfigurable logic is fun, and some of the test boards from altera and
Xilinx are FUN! The problem we have had so far is with the software, I am
just sick and tired of being the "bug finder" for every ISE release from
Xilinx. Plus everytime I contact their support people they end up trying
to sell me stuff, and that gets on my nerves (if you can answer my
question great, but if not... do not go out on a wild ass guess and tell
me I should try this or other part that I have to buy). Altera seem to be
a tad more friendly when it comes to academia (meaning we are poor and we
can not affor jack shit, specially under this economy).

Actually what I would be really excited about would be about CPUs that
have one of their functional units being a reconfigurable element. That
would be interesting....