Re: TransWarpGS Clone

[Conrad <conrad.russo@gmail.com>]

> Somehow I think that WDC gets paid some healthy bucks for commercial use of 
> 
> that design.  And, as you point out, RTL intended for ASIC synthesis is going 
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> to look one heck of a lot different than one targeted at FPGA fitting.
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> 
> 
> Steve

Forgive me if I'm incorrect here as I have never designed an ASIC, only done FPGA work, but I was under the impression that RTL coding is very similar between ASIC and FPGA design. There are some different methodologies used, some things need to be considered for one but not the other, and sometimes certain aspects of the design need to be changed to fit a particular FPGA's structure, but there should not be a significant difference between RTL designed for one and RTL designed for another. There are development environments available that will accept RTL and facilitate it's conversion to either an ASIC or VHDL, or even a bitstream for a particular FPGA, but they are beyond the reach of hobbyists, at least if you are buying them legitimately. As far as licencing costs of the RTL '816 core from WDC, I'll bet they want you to buy 10000+ licences at a similar price per license to what you'd pay per unit buying that many physical chips. There is an opensource implementation of the '816 instruction set but it's incomplete and I don't know if it implements the 16-bit side of things or just the 8-bit part. Once the clone is finished I am going to try and find out what is involved in licensing the RTL core from WDC and how it all works, but that's a while off yet.