17 Oct
2025
17 Oct
'25
12:45 p.m.
On Oct 17, 2025, at 1:02 PM, Martin Bishop
<mjd.bishop(a)emeritus-solutions.com> wrote:
Paul
You are quite correct regarding the utility and limitations of Amd and Lattice's
offerings.
Like you I have "dead" Lattice CPLD designs. Where clone's won't serve
a respin to XO2 being necessary. Best not to ask how long the XO2 licence will be gratis.
I was once assured by an FAE that the "cheap" way to obtain IP was as an
element of a support bundle : training credits, IP and tools licenses for an N kilo
quantity of currency. Not cheap enough for /work.
In my case, the design is for an early technology software defined radio; the CPLD (coded
in ABL) implements an EPP mode parallel printer port interface. I recently fired that
board up again, using a Raspberry Pico to talk to it. If I ever want to take it further,
I'd probably just pull out the 2032 CPLD entirely and hook up a Pico in its place.
Faster and far easier to program, not to mention much lower cost.
It's a fun design, with Harris (Intersil) 50214/50215 SDR chips, but the A/D is only
12 bits and combined with a clock rate of just 100 MHz it isn't all that high
performance. For 1999 it was pretty nice, though.
If I were to do a followup I'd probably try the Zedboard based SDR that a ham in
Germany published a couple of years ago. That's where the desire to get affordable
JESD appears; he didn't use that and instead needed a large number of pins for a
parallel interface.
paul