Calculator Brain Transplant Update a Vintage Design with FPGA Technology

摘要

Do you remember the glory days of Hewlett-Packard calculators? here you learn how to replace the CPU in a 30-year-old calculator with an improved FPGA implementation.rnIf you look inside a modern hand-held calculator, you'll probably find a standard microcontroller, standard static RAM, and perhaps flash memory. But as late as 2003, at least for Hewlett-Packard calculators, you would have found only custom integrated circuits, highly optimized for performing BCD floating-point math while using miniscule amounts of power. While this change is understandable given time-to-market pressures, using off-the-shelf components is less than optimal in terms of either performance or power. But many times I have heard that the main reason for the change is that it is "too expensive to develop custom integrated circuits." While this is true for leading-edge technology, this assertion does not apply here. This project started as a way to demonstrate this fact.