[rescue] Vaxen?

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On April 27, Scott Newell wrote:
> > Circuit design wouldn't be the problem--I'd be more concerned about the
> > firmware required to handle all the SCSI commands and transactions.  And do
> > it quickly!
>
>   That's what the host adapter chip is for, though.  Problem is, all
> the really fast ones are PCI-specific.  That could be painful.

There are plenty of VHDL cores available to handle everything but final
drive circuitry for interfaces up to U2W SCSI.  Same goes for SDRAM.

This entire project could be handled on a single FPGA (a medium Xilinx
Virtex would be more than enough) and a set of buffers/line drivers for
the SCSI side.  Definitely doable with a half dozen chips and a 6" square
4-layer board, though with some clever work the part count and board size
might be shrunk.

If anyone is _serious_ about this, I do know of an extremely talented
designer that could probably whip this out in his sleep.  Cost for board
would probably be in the neighborhood of $50/ea for parts/pcb, and 1-2
hours of assembly time for someone used to soldering surface mount parts
with 0.5mm pin spacing.  Sometimes mild nearsightedness isn't so bad.  :)

He'd have to deal with getting rights to the cores (cheap but annoying for
a small run) and he likes to be paid up front for piece work.  Like I
said, for serious interest this would be a very cheap product in any kind
of quantity (10 and up).

-James