Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Dedicated mb for PID

Doug Harrison wrote:

> Jon;
>
> Tell me more about this FPGA thing.

FPGAs are chips with logic cells connected be configurable switches.
Xilinx chips are programmed by a serial bit stream every time you
power them on. Generally this is provided by a serial EPROM, but
can be generated from a computer during debugging.

A $6 chip can hold about 5,000 gates. A $30 chip can hold 30,000
usable gates. I put all the logic for 4 digital step rate generators, 4
quadrature encoder counters and all the logic to control all of this
into one Xilinx XCS30 series chip (30K gates).

See http://www.xilinx.com/ for more info on this.

Jon