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FPGA-PC ATX Board Specification

Project Basics
Project Status
External Stuff (Links)

Project Basics

This project is aimed at specifying an FPGA based ATX format board for implementing PC-size machines based on FPGA-CPUs at lowest cost.

This project grew out of multiple interests:

Addendum: Since starting Andrew has changed job and now has no time to actually make any of these boards. But anyone else who wants a board like this can work from this spec, to save themselves time and get more ideas and more in to their design, and so more usefullness from it.

Addendum 2003.12.24: After 1 month forced break (HD crash, system rebuild) and 1.5 months since then of doing nothing on either PDP-10 project or on VirtexTools, I have come the the conclusion that I have lost all interest in both of them. So I have canceled them both, PDP-10 and VirtexTools. And so I also have no interest any more in using this/these board(s).

But that has no impact on the usefullness of an standard FPGA-PC board, fitting this finished spec (or similar), to serve other peoples projects (as it has happend with mafa-pc, see Links below). So I have 2003.12.25 cut this spec out of the PDP-10 project into this separate documentation.

Project Status

For the full details of done/doing/todo of the project best read the Logfile.

Done are:

2 specification files: After my negative experiences with Xilinxes information policies, which had a large part in stopping my projects, I would (if I still had interest in making an FPGA-PC) chose an different vendor. That would most likely be Altera, whose chips seem to handle vendor-independant non-chip-optimised HLL code (which is what I would use for any future project, to avoid vendor dependance) better anyway (no special features that reduce LUT count per chip size/cost, but offer more power if you do the chip-dependant coding to use them).

Doing is:

Nothing, the specification is completed, as far as I am concerned.

Todo are:

Nothing, I am not making any boards or any other FPGA projects.

External Stuff (Links)

Since making these specs and this page I have found out about 2 active FPGA-PC projects:
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This page is by Neil Franklin, last modification 2004.06.10