FPGA? [scanned]

[Markus Stehr]

Hi!

Robert Michel:
>So when the hardwareproducer use a programmed FPGA inside a GNU/Linux
>phone he has not to publish the VHDL code - right?

He dosnt have to, its hardware after all.
But why shouldnt he? The OpenMoko dudes would ;)

>But when the v1 has a SPI connector, we could solder in a FPGA for
>ourself - right? Are there FPGA with power mangement options - internal
>timer to let the FPGA sleep for a while? Wake on signal?

Thats your bussiness, AFAIK you can send a FPGA to sleep by tristating
some parts of it. Then you assign a PIN that listens to some sort of IRQ
and when the said IRQ occurs you remove the tristate mode from the rest
of the chip.

>Could FPGAs work with analog audio?
Sure, only thing you would need is some dumb A/D and D/A converter as a
FPGA is digital only, thats the drawback.
(I dont mind being corrected here, though!)

I just read trough the Xilinx webpage and trough the datasheet for the
Spartan but couldnt make out how much currency they realy eat.
Could someone state some nummbers here?

Greetings,
Markus Stehr