"Jon Leonard" <jleonard@divcom.umop-ap.com> writes:
My short answer: Yes, it's that cheap, but only if you already work with the chip vendor and have the software tools to program the chips. If not, expect to spend many thousands of dollars...
Huh? We're talking about modern FPGAs here. The cost of the tools necessary to actually *program* the damn things is very small, as almost all of them are SRAM-based and programmed out of an external EPROM, bus, or serial bitstream. Sure, we've spent $50,000 on FPGA *development* tools, but we program the serial EEPROMs themselves on $300 PC-based programmers which are available -- as are the FPGAs and EEPROMs -- from Digikey, Allied, Newark, etc., to anyone with a credit card. Actually, in almost all of our designs, the FPGAs are programmed in-circuit by application software. If I were to design a hardware key cracker, it would almost certainly be a simple ISA-bus card containing a couple of big Xilinx FPGAs which would get programmed by a simple C program. [Funny thing -- there seems to be a lot of "theft" of satellite and cable programming by folks who know just enough to use a soldering iron, but haven't a clue about what really happens inside a set-top box. How do they manage it, if they don't have the tools to design or reverse-engineer a cable converter? Hmmm...] -- Roger Williams PGP key available from PGP public keyservers Coelacanth Engineering consulting & turnkey product development Middleborough, MA wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/