[Fpga-synth] Altera Cyclone II Starter Board ?

[Scott Gravenhorst]

http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc2-2C20N.html

Has anyone messed with this?

All of the following is my opinion based on published _marketing_ information.

I like the audio connectors and the inclusion of both SDRAM (8 Mbyte) and
SRAM (64 Kbyte), but I have no idea how nasty the pin sharing is.  I'd also
have preferred at least twice that amount of SRAM.  It looks like the FPGA
internal RAM is smaller than the Xilinx XC3S500E, but it has 26 18x18
dedicated multipliers vs. XC3S500E which has 20 (with shared routes to
block RAM).  Even though the "equivalent gate" bogus count is about twice
the Xilinx part, it appears to me that the Xilinx part has about the same
capacity.

The Cyc-II multiplier arrangement is interesting, but I've not yet needed a
9x9 multiplier - however, I'm also not a 10 year design veteran either. 
The one time I needed a small multiplier it was to multiply a varying value
by a constant and it was easy to build that out of a few adders.

Also, what do they mean by 24 bit resolution coder-decoder ?  It doesn't
say _DAC_ per se and "24 bit resolution" looks suspicious of something
other than a real 24 bit DAC to me.

It _looks_ like the board price is $150, so it's comparable to the S-3Esk,
unless there's extra stuff you have to buy to make it work as an audio
development board.  It also appears as if the dev software comes included
with the board.

-- ScottG

-------------------------------------------------------------

-- Scott Gravenhorst
-- GateMan II - Xilinx Spartan-3E Based MIDI Synthesizer with SVF
-- PolyDaWG/8 - 8 Voice FPGA Polyphonic MIDI Synthesizer
-- FatMan: home1.gte.net/res0658s/fatman/
-- NonFatMan: home1.gte.net/res0658s/electronics/
-- When the going gets tough, the tough use the command line.