Re:Some Comments (Score 2, Informative)

As a practising hardware and firmware design engineer, I take issue with some of your numbers. Not that it means I totally disagree with the conclusion, but we'll get there. 1. A decent Virtex 2 will set you back, but it's not 3k unless you need a million or two equivalent gates. I use a fairly high-end Virtex-II on a design and it costs about 1k. You would need only the programming tool and that's free for the software. The cable is specified on the Xilinx site, and it's easy to fabricate. There are other FPGAs as well - Altera makes a nice line in the sub 1k range, and it performs well up to about 150MHz. 2. Boards can be run ( let's say a 12 layer board , although that's overkill for this) in low quantities for about $500/board. I do prototypes like this almost weekly up to 24 layers ( or so it seems lately ) and I know what I am paying. You'll have to buy a panel, though, so the cost would be # on panel ( probably 6 for this size board on a small panel)* cost per unit - about 3k as a guesstimate. 3. DDR266 needs a base clock of 133MHz, which FPGAs can do quite easily now. The data and strobes burst at the higher rate, but local pipelining of the data buffers ( meeting the DDR spec for a 2x pipeline) is fairly simple. More difficult is the strobe delay adjusters, but it's all spec'd. I think the purpose is more to be able to generate a controller that could be used. Designing PCBs with fast DDR or fast anything really ( it's not just the raw speed, it's the timing budget ) is still a lesser known skill especially if it's soldered down. Designing a PCI card is child's play - I can get reference designs including layout from 10 places at least. The big issue here would be PCB layout - the tools to do this sort of unit *will* set you back 20-50k, and those are the tools neceessary for high density, high layer count, rules oriented boards. I don't think it's out of the scope for what they want to do, if they can lay their hands on the layout and schematic capture tools - maybe I'll help 'em design the board and lay it out ;) #include