This is just a potpourri of FPGA related items.
I’m fairly interested in hardware design (although have not really done very much of it). I’ve been looking for some cheap programmable hardware, and found out about Digilent. They have boards based upon the Xilinx Spartan II FPGAs for around $100, and the Coolrunner CPLD for only $39. Xess Corporation has more boards, for a bit more buckage. You can also find cheap board layouts for a Spartan II evaluation board if you are more comfortable having boards fabbed (this one is only a 2 layer board, should be fairly economical to have manufactured). Some people are interested in using FPGAs for audio applications or for central processing units of your own design.
Daily Archives: 3/4/2003
OLED displays…
The new up and coming display technology is Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLED displays. OLEDs will be cheaper to manufacture, have a much faster response time, don’t need to be backlit, draw less power, are brighter, and can be viewed over a much larger viewing angle. In short, they are very nearly the ideal display device. We’ve had a prototype here at Pixar for a while, and it is impressive. Kodak is the first vendor I know to announce a product with an OLED display, although I suspect that every cell phone in the universe will acquire these displays in the next year, with computer monitors following closely behind.
I can’t wait.