FPGA in CompactFlash card
Posted July 8, 2005
This is a sweet little device. It is a CompactFlash accelerator card, containing a beefy FPGA chip that can be customized to perform specialized processing tasks for your portable/embedded application. The specs here are awesome: 32 GFlops if you configure it as a DSP, plus a 450 MHz PowerPC core with RAM, flash, and gigabit Ethernet for more traditional computing tasks. Too bad about the price, though.
I love FPGAs, since they combine the best of the worlds of hardware and software engineering: the power, speed, and level of control you get from being able to specify things at nearly the gate level, plus the ease of revision you get from the fast edit-compile-test cycle of coding. In my ideal world, they would be a lot more common and accessible... a card like this which packages up a huge chip into a friendly package is just perfect.