Hi All,

Disappearance of ISA slot in modern PC's makes building of extension boards
much more complicated (In fact the new "legacy free PC" specification from
Micro$oft tends to change PC into the closed system completely useless for
hobbyist/small firm hardware development). Making of PCI board is much more
difficult (and much more expensive if we consider the price of "PCI
bridge"). However I think, that this task could be significantly simplified
by manufacturing of "programmable prototype boards".

I think it could be done with simple board containing:

1) PCI connector
2) The programmable FPGA circuit (I'd suggest Altera ACEX EP1K50FC256
   because of it's relatively low price, PCI compatible I/Os, freely
   downloadable development tools <even VHDL or Verilog>)
3) The prototyping area.
With the availability of free PCI controller core (http://www.opencores.org)
it should be relatively easy to use such prototype board for manufacturing
of PC extensions.

The only problem is that EP1K50FC256 is in BGA case so it is almost
impossible to produce such board at home :-(.

Maybe someone would like to produce such boards? Probably there wolud be
many people (hobbyist or even profesionals) interested in using it?

--
                                    Regards,
                              Wojciech M. Zabolotny
        http://www.ise.pw.edu.pl/~wzab  <--> wzab@ise.pw.edu.pl

http://www.freedos.org  Free DOS for free people!

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