02/03/07 - Initial ideas and architecture review

As stands, I am looking at varius alternatives for the proccessor implimentation.
Options are:
1: A comercial microcontroller (i.e. a PIC)
2: A comerical microproccessor (many many many)
3: A microproccessor on an FPGA

1: simple, but programming may be a problem, we might end up putting two PICs on, one to handle the network and the programming. Advantage is that they are easily available in easy packages.

2: I dont really see the advantage of this over a PIC based system. I have ideas over how you could make it do the programming, but I think that in terms of the network it might be a fucker.

3: Microproccer and network on an FPGA with a vendor provided or possibly opencores risc softcore proccessor - If we could use the vendor "Altera" for our FPGAs this would be quite easily realizable. I have looked into packaging, it is sometimes possible to get surface mounted FPGAs, not BGA ones, but we might find it prefforable to get a socket for BGA ones, and then buy BGA ones.
The reason I am enthusiastic to do this option if possible rather than the 2 PIC option which is my current 2nd favourite is the flexibility it would give us in terms of programming and periferals.
It seems that a lot of the soft proccessors come with all the work I would need to plug them into memory already done. FPGAs are a bit more pricy than pics.

As stands I'm reading up on embedded systems. I was chuffed to discover its a 20 credit module not a 10.