Choosing micro controller

[iliya24]

Hello
i am standing before decision what to choose micro or fpga to my project from what i understand fpga is much more powerful for complex calcification but i would like to know what parameters should i check that will tell me if micro controller is able to preform have calculation in order to be able to transmit/recive data at least 10Mbits
Thx

 

[josiphal]

Don't know about FPGA and 10 Mbps transfer. Anyway, there are microcontrollers (ARM mostly) that are able to do 1 instruction / 1 cycle and have USB module with 1 MB/s transfer rate.

 

[keith1200rs]

The PIC range can handle that sort of data rate and faster as well - certainly the PIC32 and probably the PIC24 range. The exact choice will depend on other factors such as cost, memory requirements, power consumption, other I/O and signal processing requirements and what you are planning to do with the data.

Keith

 

[josiphal]

AFAIK, PIC/Atmel are far from 1 instruction per cycle, so for me they are at the end of the list for fast data processing.

 

[keith1200rs]

What counts is processing speeds. I have been capturing data at 35M words/s on a PIC24E (70MIPS).

Keith

 

[josiphal]

If "capturing" is storing external data from port to internal RAM by DMA, MCLK/2 is standard speed. I guess that for your device MCLK is 70 MHz (because MIPS not telling me much)?

I prefer devices with big number of registers, where all registrar based instruction can execute in only 1 cycle. Know that with PIC/Atmel this was not the case in past, don't know if they change something with new products.

 

[keith1200rs]

PIC24 has clk/2 for instruction cycle so 140MHz clock for PIC24E. Most instructions are single cycle. DMA is actually slower with the PICs - the best I have managed is around 15M words/sec, depending on configuration. Choosing a processor is not easy. I have found that the only way to really know what works best for a particular design problem is to try it, but that takes time, money and resources.

Keith

 

[josiphal]

I made simple logic analyzer, with 12 MHz sampling (DMA) while MSP430F5xx MCLK is only 24 MHz. And MSP430 target are low-power application, not hi-speed.

https://www.edaboard.com/threads/290925/#post1243918

BTW, didn't know that most of the new PIC's instruction are 1 cycle. I was following PIC scene 10 years ago.