[tubesrule]

Originally Posted by ppppenguin

I would recommend a Spartan 3A unless you have a specific reason to use 3E. The 3A emerged as the mainstream series ahead of the 3E which I think of as a bit of a backwater. I know the Aurora uses a 3E but not sure Darryl would recommend it for a new design either. Actually all the Spartan 3 stuff has recently been taken off the main "recommended for new designs" list. Spartan 6 now seems to the main low cost series but I would have no worries about using 3A for quite a while yet.

This sounds like an interesting project, and would be a useful device when finished.

The main difference between the Spartan 3E and 3A is the 3E is targeted for designs that require more logic with a moderate amount of I/O while the 3A is for more I/O intensive designs. Because of the dual ring I/O in the 3A, there are other differences that need to be considered in the design like the removal of input protection diodes for most standards.

The Spartan 6 is certainly recommended for any new designs, and while its capabilities far exceed those of the Spartan 3, there is only one leaded package available for the Spartan 6 with everything else being leadless. This sort of precludes the possibility of soldering them at home.

Xilinx is wonderful at not obsoleting parts for many years, so there is no fear in choosing a Spartan 3 for this project. Any part in this family would be more than capable of reading a raw video stream from a flash card and formatting it if necessary. Since Kat pointed out that FFMpeg would be a good choice to get the data onto the flash card, you may want to go with a larger fpga and take a stab at doing decompression in the fpga for one of the compressed formats FFMpeg supports. This would certainly be a substantial project on its own, but could allow for hours of video on a single flash card. Then you could add fast forward and review buttons, and lots of other goodies.

Darryl