Bitcoin mining with FPGAs

 Posted on July 19, 2011  |  Jeff Johnson

Recently, what looks to be the first open source FPGA bitcoin miner was released on GitHub. The code is based on the Terasic DE2-115 development board featuring the Altera Cyclone IV, however the author says the design should be applicable to any other FPGA. Maybe we should make it work on a Xilinx FPGA? Here is what they say about its performance: Project is fully functional and allows mining of Bitcoins both in a Pool and Solo. [Read More]
bitcoin 

Is Xilinx losing to the competition?

 Posted on July 5, 2011  |  Jeff Johnson

I recently read an interesting article on Xilinx’s position with respect to its competitors: Is Xilinx Good Enough for You? As someone who works mainly with Xilinx FPGAs, I find it important to know how they are faring competitively. If one day a competitor manages to blow Xilinx out of the water, I would like to have seen it coming. The image below was taken from Google Trends and shows Google search results for Xilinx and Altera. [Read More]

The Virtex-6 based ML605

 Posted on July 1, 2011  |  Jeff Johnson

Forget about the ML505. The ML605 just made it obsolete. Not because of the Virtex-6 or the 8-lane PCIe or the DDR3… You need the ML605 because it has two FMC expansion connectors, one high-pin count and one low-pin count. You could do practically anything with this board. Why do I like it? Because for once we have a board that lets you interface real data at a high throughput to a beast of an FPGA. [Read More]
virtex-6 

FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) is a game-changer

 Posted on June 23, 2011  |  Jeff Johnson

If you’re a hardware developer, you know the problem: My product integrates the FPGA and ADC on the one compact PCB, but now my customers want a higher-speed ADC, or a DAC, or both. Now I have to take on the risk of designing a whole new board to satisfy that demand. I’m getting killed on repairs because the cost of my field-replacable-unit is too high. Having too many high-cost devices on the same board is just not economical. [Read More]

Big changes are coming!

 Posted on June 15, 2011  |  Jeff Johnson

Some of you will know that I ran some polls on the site over the last couple of months. Well I checked out the results and accordingly there will be some big changes on the site, the first of which is that I’ve moved to WordPress and given the site a fresh new look. Thanks to all the people who responded to the polls, your input was very very appreciated! Here are the changes: [Read More]

XUPV2P Board

 Posted on October 19, 2008  |  Jeff Johnson

Hardware Details The Xilinx University Program Virtex-II Pro (XUPV2P) Development System from Digilent is a development board for the Virtex-II Pro FPGA. It contains many useful hardware features including: Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP30 FPGA 10/100Mbps Ethernet PHY USB port Compact Flash card slot XSGA Video port Audio Codec SATA connectors (2 hosts, 1 target) PS/2 and RS-232 ports High and Low Speed expansion connectors  Virtex-II Pro FPGA Details [Read More]