Nice, but some examples of (potential) applications would be nice Why just 32 LUTs instead of at least a few hundred? Enough to build a specialized SERDES or that sort of thing.
Eduard · 4h ago
only 32 LUTs also made me scratch my head: what kind of useful things can be made with so few components?
It includes a creative demo where your browser apparently gets hooked up with a live video stream of an actual running toy hardware setup of a "CLB demo featuring a European traffic light".
It's effectively a finite state machine with two red-yellow-green traffic lights. This minimal setup already consumes 26 of the available 32 units.
Btw: as a European, let me assure you that our intersections usually consist of more than two traffic lights, include a fault state (blinking yellow light), and feature synchronized pedestrian lights on which we mostly stand until they turn green.
indrora · 2h ago
> only 32 LUTs also made me scratch my head: what kind of useful things can be made with so few components?
There's plenty of options: Memory mappers and Very Simple encryption come to mind. Stuff that is intended to make it Just That Much Harder to get to. Very tiny little finite state machines that handle One Thing.
fake-name · 35m ago
These are intended to implement things like specialized communication protocols, or other IO behaviour. Basically, it lets you push a variety of things you'd normally do via CPU polling to the hardware.
You could easily do SPI (or something similar, like BiSS-C) in 32 LUTs.
Basically, this is a pretty broadly available IO abstraction.
RicoElectrico · 5h ago
> However, they don’t document how to configure it yourself, only referring you to their online configurator tool that submits jobs to an API that places and routes to LUTs.
This is just insane. SaaS-ification got even the largely conservative embedded market.
Microchip has a web page about "CLB"
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers/8-...
It includes a creative demo where your browser apparently gets hooked up with a live video stream of an actual running toy hardware setup of a "CLB demo featuring a European traffic light". It's effectively a finite state machine with two red-yellow-green traffic lights. This minimal setup already consumes 26 of the available 32 units.
Btw: as a European, let me assure you that our intersections usually consist of more than two traffic lights, include a fault state (blinking yellow light), and feature synchronized pedestrian lights on which we mostly stand until they turn green.
There's plenty of options: Memory mappers and Very Simple encryption come to mind. Stuff that is intended to make it Just That Much Harder to get to. Very tiny little finite state machines that handle One Thing.
You could easily do SPI (or something similar, like BiSS-C) in 32 LUTs.
The Raspberry Pi Pico modules have something similar (their PIO modules, which support up to 32 instructions - https://dev.to/blues/a-practical-look-at-pio-on-the-raspberr...).
TI also have a CLB module that's actually even smaller (though they document theirs) - https://www.ti.com/lit/ug/spruir8b/spruir8b.pdf
Basically, this is a pretty broadly available IO abstraction.
This is just insane. SaaS-ification got even the largely conservative embedded market.