I'm in placement and I've to choose a FPGA with a soft/hard core to replace a microcontroler (mpc860 motorola). How can I compare Altera's & Xilinx's Fpga (one uses Logic elements while the other uses logic cells) ? :?:
mpc860, As indicated in it's product summary page, is mainly used for making communication devices and at the first stage, I think you should indicate, what you are going to do with it? what kind of data is intended to be processed by this device, the answer to this question is I think necessay before we can talk about which of altera or xilinx, and then, which FPGA is better.
The mpc860 is on a daughtercard placed upon a card containing 2 FPGA which manage E1 to ethernet frames compression /decompression . The MPC860 gives configuration information to the FPGA at the start and manage also a RS485 communication to configure the FPGA with several informations used for compression/decompression (time slots, user preferences...). It makes also statistics on the result of the compression/decompression and gives configuration information to an ASIC which makes the A/D conversion. What a mess !!!
I have to buy a development kit (VIRTEX II Pro or EXCALIBUR) in order to develop the same functions with a soft and/or a hard core before a real study to upgrade the boards. As it's the first time that I have to do such things I'm a bit lost... Does it seems mad to realize it?
Microblaze seems to be faster (125D-MIPS) than NIOS (50D-mips) and I don't see differences in their architecture. Virtex II pro seems to be bigger and faster than Excalibur and it has a powerpc like MPC860 so it would be easier to transfer.
I think XILINX FPGA will be a better choice, not only for its PowerPC hard core inside, but the FPGA architecture(connectivity etc.) and the technical support. XILINX still lead the way to SOC design.
I use both Xilinx and Altera, but I like Xilinx much more than Altera except the PLL stuff of Altera, so if you donot need complex clocking stuff, use Xilinx.
Frankly speaking, besides the low cost, Altera is becoming better and better, not only the FPGA architecture but the Quartus tool. With the advent of StratixII, the ALMs inside it are really something interesting. By the end of year 2004, Statix-II and Virtex4 (yes, Virtex4), which do you think is the winner??? Let's see it with our own eyes.
Xilinx is more easier and good than Altera,
Xilinx is having more resources than Altera to play around the tool,device.
Also xilinx supports memory read,write registered,but altera doesnt