FI programming geek question, what chips do they use? Options

[need4speed]

I'm still a drooler, but I may have my first 914 in a couple of weeks if things work out.

And I'm already dreaming of building my own FI system (though the car I'm looking at is a 1.8 with what the owner says is a good, working L-Jet system).

And I'm wondering - has anybody ever seen an FI brain that uses an FPGA chip, instead of a regular chip designed for the task?

A buddy of mine works at Xylinx, and he explained to me about these FPGA chips - mostly used in routers and stuff - it's basically a big array of programmable gates, and you can load a program on by physically configuring the gates a certain way, and then, instead of loading software in to run on the chip - the chip works as if it's a custom designed IC. I kind of thought I'd like to try using something like this - I'm not a really experienced programmer, but I have worked with computers for 12 years, and I've always wanted to take on a project like this.

Any thoughts?

[sechszylinder]

hilow,

I'm using fpga's since 10 years and I can tell you that you need lots of experience using those circuits.
BTW FPGAs are programmable logic circuits and they are not really well suited for a FI brain.
Most FIs using mircoprocessors or highly integrated microcontrollers, like megasquirt which uses a
68hc908 (6800 derivative, 8-bit architecture, it's not a 68000 clone, even if there is only one zero
missing in the name (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) )

I would recommend to start with systems like megasquirt and if your are not satisfied then try to build your own ...

benno