An Open gate-array is one of those "if you build it, they will come" sort of things. Chinese fabs would compete with each other to drive the price down. It would become the standard low-end part and gate-array manufacturers would have to compete on high-end only.

So I am really interested in doing it, and so is Chris. We just can't ignore our current business in order to do it.

Yes, we feel your pain. Indeed, it's our pain. Proprietary tools, and you get told how to load the bitstream but it's an opaque blob. We would like to work on this problem next. How far off that is I can't say, if we can establish a profitable land-mobile radio business (we don't expect to make much off of hams alone) it would help to fund such an effort.

Chris and I would like to do an Open gate array as our next project. Sufficient patents have expired, etc.

If you ever write a means of describing digital logic designs in Lua we can compare it. Just describing data structures is not sufficient, you need to describe parallel boolean algebraic operations and macrocells such as multiply. At the moment no such thing exists and it would take a long time to duplicate the work of the MyHDL project.

Not sure you understand. The OO model is useful for representing a 4-input device with a logical output determined by a look-up table, which is the fundamental logical element. At least it's useful to do it elegantly. Lua is a small embedded language, but the purpose of MyHDL in this case is not to execute Python at runtime but to generate VHDL or Verilog describing an inherently parallel implementation of an algorithm.

Chris can explain this much better than I, but we are definitely conscious of the gate-array resource use. Currently we are running within the space of the least expensive SmartFusion II chip, which I think you can get for $18 in quantity. Smartfusion 1 was more of a problem as it didn't have any multiplier macrocells and we had to make those out of gates. SmartFusion II provides 11 multipliers in the lowest end chip, and thus the fixed-point multiply performance of a modern desktop chip for a lot less power.

We are also aware of algorithmic costs. For example we were using Weaver's third method and will probably go to something else, maybe a version of Hartley.

I beat you to first post. Nyahh! Booyah!

HackRF is designed to be test equipment rather than a legal radio transceiver. It doesn't meet the FCC specifications for spectral purity, especially when amplified. You could probably make filters to help it produce a legal output.

Whitebox is meant to meet FCC specifications for spurious signals that are required when amplification of 25 watts or higher is used. Amplifiers also contribute spurious signals and will usually incorporate their own filters.

HackRF is something that sticks on your laptop via USB. Whitebox is meant to be a stand-alone system or one that is controlled from your Smartphone via a WiFi or Bluetooth link.

Whitebox is optimized for battery power. Using a FLASH-based gate-array rather than the conventional SRAM one makes a big difference.

HackRF is designed to be test equipment rather than a legal radio transceiver. It doesn't meet the FCC specifications for spectral purity, especially when amplified. You could probably make filters to help it produce a legal output.

Whitebox is meant to meet FCC specifications for spurious signals that are required when amplification of 25 watts or higher is used. Amplifiers also contribute spurious signals and will usually incorporate their own filters.

HackRF is something that sticks on your laptop via USB. Whitebox is meant to be a stand-alone system or one that is controlled from your Smartphone via a WiFi or Bluetooth link.

Whitebox is optimized for battery power. Using a FLASH-based gate-array rather than the conventional SRAM one makes a big difference.

That is about the break point between windows 2.0 and windows 3.0, with only the later doing "windows" as is commonly meant today. Windows 2 could only tile.

Alexander Stepanov, I have never had a chance to ask someone as qualified as you about this topic. I grew up on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain and have constantly wondered if (surely there must have been) alternative computing solutions developed in the USSR prior to Elbrus and SPARC. So my question is whether or not you know of any hardware or instruction set alternatives that died on the vine or were never mass fabricated in Soviet times? I don't expect to you to reveal some super advanced or future predicting instruction set but it has always disturbed me that these things aren't documented somewhere -- as you likely know failures can provide more fruit than successes. Failing that, could you offer us any tails of early computing that only seem to run in Russian circles?

If you can suggest references (preferably in English) I would be most appreciative. I know of only one book and it seems to be a singular point of view.

Oh sure. And I could solder with Mercury, and that has a really low melting point :-). I imagine the application for a solder with a 160F melting point is very specialized. I don't ever want to specify a transportation temperature limit for consumer electronics of 160F, a freight container can exceed that.

Drilling holes in a multi-layer board is liable to nail a trace you can't see. If you are lucky you can shine a really bright light through it and see all of the traces. If you can't, don't try drilling.