Assembled Minimig v1.1, larger FPGA (BGA-package)

[JimS]

Tron2k2 wrote:

Anyway, since the new FPGA has so many gates, are there enough for, say, an 020 or even 030 CPU in there?  

Someone's looking into that....  I believe the open-source 680x0 core has some problems. Another interesting idea- put the PIC controller in the FPGA. That would save a chip... but then you'd have to add a flash ram to load the FPGA.

[JimS]

freqmax wrote:
Putting the MCU (pic18) inside the FPGA poses an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. It will make upgrading the FPGA flash  more cumbersome. And soldered EEPROMs have a limited number of write cycles.
The EEPROM loads the FPGA. And the FPGA can then read the flashcard. But it can't reload itself.

Yeah, a which came first situation indeed. But, if you use one of those FPGA dev boards like the XESS one you mentioned later, the flash ram is already present. The XESS board can store 4 fpga bitmaps. So it should be possible to configure the FPGA without the pic, and reserve a vhdl pic for just floppy emulation and the control panel.