Actel a42mx09pl84 supply

[pezman]

Further to recent discussions on FPGAs, I do spot a42mx09pl84 chips on boards in the dumpster fairly often.

Are thes.flash programmable (and therefore worth saving?)

[Dave]

Dunno. Personally I'm not a big fan of pulling high-pin-count components off of boards and trying to reuse them. You have to spend a significant effort to build up a board around these chips, and then if something is wrong, you never know if you fried it when you were desoldering it, or it was defective in the first place, or what.

I would tend to lean towards something that is dirt cheap and easier for people like us to use. I'm not aware of any free tools for Actel FPGAs (I could easily be mistaken). I think that basically means sticking with Xilinx or Altera, and probably going with their older chips (which tend to be cheaper anyway). For example, here's a Xilinx part, a Spartan 3-A. It's $6.12 a piece at DigiKey, free dev software is available, it's in the same family as the chip on the Papilio and many other affordable FPGA dev boards but doesn't have as many logic elements. And it's only a 100TQFP package, so it's easily big enough to hand-solder on a PCB you etched at home.

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/XC3S50A-4VQG100C/122-1592-ND/1956974

-Dave