Re: fun little board

>http://www.activewireinc.com/
>
>It's a little Anchor Chips USB board with daughter cards (incl D/A's)

That's cool. The Anchor part is kinda neat-- I have a development system
from when we were evaluating USB stuff. They have a nice PC-based app that
lets you muck around with stuff without having to write USB drivers to just
send basic messages.

I dunno if USB would really be fast enough for a vector display or not in
bulk mode... You could probably use isoc mode OK. The killer time-wise is
if you have to tell anything back to the host-- Windows and the PC BIOS eats
a several millisecond delay everytime you try. (goodbye throughput)

The Anchor part's 8051 core doesn't have a whole lot of spare MIPS when it's
moving data either, so you'd need some other circuitry to do the work of
drawing a display. On a non-anchorchips design we've been able to move
about ~900Kbytes/sec with a custom USB driver and nothing else on the bus
and doing transmit-only (no handshake or communication back to the PC) in
bulk mode. (That's with a 75MHz ARM720 hitting a USB interface IC as fast
as it can with 0-wait state memory.) As a more practical measure look to be
more in the 450Kbyte/sec range. I guess that's not horrible though-- at 30
frames per second you could do around 15Kbyte display lists at 30Hz refresh.

-Clay
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
** To UNSUBSCRIBE from vectorlist, send a message with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the
** message body to vectorlist-request@synthcom.com. Please direct other
** questions, comments, or problems to neil@synthcom.com.
Received on Thu Feb 17 02:27:23 2000