About CPU/Chips (split from: Re: Why to use assembly??)

[dedndave]

if one were to get software for a few of the more popular brands, and maybe some burners, you could probably make a living with that stuff here in the Phoenix valley

[vanjast]

Microsemi are offering the whole Libero IDE free (well, I got it for free at a seminar ?) and they offer a years free user license which I think is renewable, for free  :green2
A cheapy intro programmer (I haven't got yet) which can do most of the chips except the more complicated ones, goes for about ZAR800 (~USD100)

I think it's the 'plastercine toy' of the new millenia.. you can do just about anything with it. Lots of gizmos around the corner  :bg

I think it will take us into the same era as when repairing radios no longer was cost effective and you just bought another one.
We are more or less there now, but this will further entrench it.
:8)

[vanjast]

if one were to get software for a few of the more popular brands, and maybe some burners, you could probably make a living with that stuff here in the Phoenix valley

Dave hanging out at Hill Valley station entrance, Phoenix.... hat upside down on the floor with a few coins in it.
He's holding a programmer of sorts, connected by wires to a box with a winding device/generator.
A sign saying - Program your children for 1$
:green2

[dedndave]

 :P

yah - the software can free, or very inexpensive
they are more interested in selling 1,000,000 chips than they are in selling 10 copies of the program
i always enjoyed digital circuit design
nice thing about ASIC's/FPGA's is - no router   :bg

[BogdanOntanu]

I have an FPGA development board and software at home. The board itself costed a few bucks (250$ approx if i recall correctly).

Trust me the "real" software for programming it is closed source and it does cost a LOT, somewhere in range of $5,000 or more with full options.

Not really a cheap hobby. Yes with the board they give you access to some free web versions and one year for a limited version on CD... but it is just "incentive".

The "real" professional software for doing chip design costs a huge amount of money. Out of reach for everybody.

After all you intend to mass produce a device (like say 100K Ixphone X clones..eh?) THEN you MUST spend at least 1 million $ for start :P

Each and every embedded device project where I was employed had an initial budget of over 1 million $ per year for research and development and tools (hardware+software) and actual fabrications costs are usually bigger.

There are some GNU "free" alternatives but they are not yet good to go for the latest devices on the market (if they will ever be).

At home you can do some PIC's and an 80C51 and maybe play with the Raspberry PI a little and play with an FPGA dev board using the CD  included dumbed down software and using predefined free IPO CPU's like MIPS  ... at least I can :D ...  but that is all ;)

I doubt you can really do your own ARM chip without an special huge discount for the IPO

[dedndave]

Each and every embedded device project where I was employed had an initial budget of over 1 million $ per year
for research and development and tools (hardware+software) and actual fabrications costs are usually bigger.

1) holy fuck, man
2) we try to do a product design in 6 months or less - start to finish
3) i have done many product designs (simple products) with a total budget under 100 K
4) holy fuck, man
5) i guess that's why we don't see a lot of products out of Romania

[dedndave]

but - i know you're right about the cost of the full software packages
more than once, they have given us the full software package for single-use, though
they want to sell chips - and, when it is a new one, they really want to sell chips
it could be that the sales rep was bending the rules   :P

at any rate, if you were going to just do custom chip design, it may be worth the cash out-lay
provided the software accomodates a wide selection of IC's (generally, they do)

[vanjast]

You can get some good IDE's/programmers nice-n-cheap.

I was trying to buy Analog Devices DSP IDE and the local salespeople were trying to shaft me ZAR 32,000 about 6 years back.
So I wrote an email to Analog USA, asking if I could buy it for ZAR 8000 as that is all I could afford at that moment, and that 32K was wayyyy too steep.

A nice lady in Analog's upper management sent a few emails around and in a week I got a serial number for the fully fledged IDE for USD 0, nudder, zippo.
I was so happy I just roared with laughter for days....

:bg

[BogdanOntanu]

Each and every embedded device project where I was employed had an initial budget of over 1 million $ per year
for research and development and tools (hardware+software) and actual fabrications costs are usually bigger.

1) holy fuck, man
2) we try to do a product design in 6 months or less - start to finish

Same time expectations in "my" projects (I usually was just a "simple" employee).

From start idea/budget approved, nobody hired yet phase until the fabrication of the first 100K devices and sales on the shelf in under 1 year time.

I speak about big devices here, things like set top boxes with PVR and satellite and inet to Iphone clones or tablets all using kind of standard CPU's (non-x86, non FPGS, non custom made) like MIPS, ARMs, STMIcros, using hardware MPEG decoders, picture in picture, web browsers, tcp/ip stacks, usb stacks, DDRAM buss interfaces, security, compression, encryption, etc

I do not speak about the average mp3 player or weather station with FM radio here. I speak about devices that sell around 100$ up to 300$ on the shelf.

The budget included, payroll for all employees including CEO, compilers, PC's, licenses, royalties, development boards, SDKs, software components, debug tools, everything needed from project start until project was finished.

3) i have done many product designs (simple products) with a total budget under 100 K
4) holy fuck, man
5) i guess that's why we don't see a lot of products out of Romania

Nope, you understood me wrongly or I was not clear enough ... this kind of work was never done by me in Romania, "we" usually do not have such amounts of money to invest in local high tech projects or maybe I never really searched well...

However a few such local projects exist (probably with a much lower budget), for example  one Romanian company does produce a tablet with android :D

I worked in Europe and for many US firms (remotely)  ;)

[BogdanOntanu]

A nice lady in Analog's upper management sent a few emails around and in a week I got a serial number for the fully fledged IDE for USD 0, nudder, zippo.
I was so happy I just roared with laughter for days....

:bg

Do not count on it, I recall one compiler instance costing near 10.000$ per seat. And we needed 5 or 10 of them.
Maybe if you ask nicely you can get such dreams... but in practice once they "smell" that will really produce something it will cost you a lot.

And usually you can not use the same CPU for the whole product line... (unless you are Apple of course) usually you find one new producer in China that will fab you 100K boards at half the price ***IF*** you can make your system work with yet another CPU and another chipset :D :D :D

But for small stuff like 80c51 or PIC's then yes free tools exist and work as expected... you just can not really compete...

[BogdanOntanu]

Oh and Clive was right, IF you can make the system work with half the RAM for example and you save 2 or 5 or maybe 10$ per device then you gain a lot on the whole production and such skills are appreciated.... BUT they have to be in C/C++ not in ASM :D

Last time I have ever used ASM in an embedded projects was 10 years ago when one custom OS component was not restoring one register correctly in an hardware interrupt routine... (on an ARM CPU)  ...  and then nothing else.

[vanjast]

I agree with you if you're in the big company 'rush' programs, but as a small guy one can make inroads with 'accessory products' and if you get your story right from the beginning, one can purely use Asm and as Dave mentioned, good managing of a library database, will see longevity into new cpus and new products.

If I came up with something that, businesswise, took off like a rocket.. I'd sell it (with royalties) to the 'greedy' fat businessman, and let him 'stuff' it up from there.
and with the cash earned I'll move onto the next project and live it up.
:wink

[Farabi]

I hope that ARM device using real physical memory than accessing to harddisk, I think that what causing Windows slow when playing a game. PS3 or xBox360 is far faster than any laptops.

[vanjast]

Well disks are moving fast towards FlashDisk (SSDs I think they're called). Faster than the 'wheelie' drive and theoretically more reliable.
About 6 months ago the max was about 100GB.. so you can bet it's going to be around 500GB or 1TB by the end of this year.

The PC is going to be fast again... :bg