Michael J. Mahon wrote:
That sounds great, Steve. It shouldn't be too hard to bit-bang it
at 50kbits/sec or so, assuming that the FPGA doesn't limit the speed.
No worries here - the FPGA doesn't mind 12 MHz clock :)
Alex mentioned configs of about 160K bytes, so that works out to about
1280kbits/50kbits or around 30 seconds of data transfer over JTAG,
plus a few seconds to read the config file from a hard disk--sounds
quite reasonable. It should be quicker than booting a PC. ;-)
I suggest you may want to start reading xapp058 available on the Xilinx'
web site - using a microcontroller to program FPGAs. In this case Apple
can impersonate a microcontroller. Or you can start with some other
implementation of this not quite trivial code that will need to be
ported to Apple. Sounds like a fun project for somebody.