Glenn: I would tend to agree with the MT48LC16M8A2 is the way to go. I also think Grant is right about only needing some small logic to address the IC. The SDRAM looks pretty basic too. There's some odd requirements to it's startup though which I'd have to think about, but I don't think it's a bad choice for what we want to use it for.
It's 3.3v, so we'd need some level translation obviously. I count 29 lines we will need to interface with. May be one or two that aren't need as I have just skimmed the data sheet at this point. So a GAL would work for addressing and refresh (the thing does CBR 'standard' rate it looks like) but not level translation unless there's some new ICs I don't know about. So a small CPLD would probably be our best choice, but I'd have to do a bit of research to tell for sure.
TSOP is good as I can solder that and we can also find DIP adapters pretty cheaply for prototyping.
I have Quartus but haven't really played around with it too much. I liked it because it had a schematic entry feature for design. No need to learn an HDL if you didn't want to. Altera also offers a pretty decent selection of parts. They also offer what they call 'Certified Design Centers' to help with different projects. I'll get on the phone with them and see if I can't find what part they would recommend and possibly talk with one of their Certified Design Centers and see what kind of price they would charge for creating the HDL program for us. If it's only a few hundred dollars then I say we let them do it and split the costs. That would save us a lot of time and in reality the program really shouldn't be that hard to create. Once we have a working model to work with we could modify the code as needed for other things. But at least we would have an example rather then starting from scratch and trying to learn everything at once.
Thoughts/ideas?
I'll post what I find here.
Grant: Why wouldn't this work for you? I don't follow.
PS - Grant: Can others see this Forum as well? I don't really care but if I send someone here I just want to know that they can see everything and follow along.
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