DDR interfacing with FPGA

I'd like to make a data acquisition system with huge memory depth, as mainly an academic exercise. Something like 12-bit 100 MSamples/sec with at least 256Mbit of storage (arbitrarily large would be nice). However, my only experience with FPGA's has been an introductory university class. Would I be crazy in trying to do this? I feel like the only barrier is money (assume I have infinite time . I know that FPGA software packages can be pretty expensive, so I doubt there are inexpensive ones that will let me synthesize a DDR SDRAM controller. And I doubt there's a cheap implementation of one available too. And, any FPGA's that are powerful enough to handle a controller would probably be insanely expensive, right? Is it possible to run it on an FPGA under $100 or is this going to be a pipe dream?

I think it could be useful to others as a generic high memory depth FPGA data acquisition system, if well documented.

---------- Post added at 04:01 ---------- Previous post was at 03:00 ----------

Seems like it's very feasible and not too expensive. Got one of these dev boards to play around with for the time being:

Is it possible to run it on an FPGA under $100

Click to expand...

Basically yes, but you may have problems to find a license free DDR controller core for the FPGA.

Also take a look Projects :: OpenCores
, maybe you can find something.

Alex

I am doing something similar at the moment (a 100MSPS scope), so my suggestion would be to use one of Xilinx's FPGAs, because their ISE suite includes an IP core for handling DDR with their Spartan/Virtex series chips.
Since the ISE webkit supports this and is free, this makes it quick and easy to do (well ish).

Their cheapest FPGAs that support it would be a Spartan 3: could be got for under £10, and some of Micron's 256MBit DDR would only set you back another £5/6 so the biggest cost would be PCB manufacture.

Thanks. I think I'll go with the Spartan 6 as it has a hardware memory controller that can do full speed 800Mbit/s. The cheapest one that has the controller is only about $30, so it's not too bad. Digilent's board has some DDR2 integrated so it'll be easy to evaluate.