[J-core] The main goals for J2

[Daniel V]

Hi!

Found this project today. And it's looks impressing, solving a lot of
issues regarding hardware design. Primarily for getting to market
fast, and avoiding unnecessary license fees.

Is the primary goal of this, to get a fast way to implement custom CPU
instructions, in a hardware design? that also can run C code and Linux
out of the box?

Looking at different MCU designs, they fail at providing a SDRAM
interface, and providing a USB-bootloader in ROM (that could program
flash or SD-card, or boot from code uploaded to RAM). Another thing,
is failing to provide LVDS interfaces onboard, in conjunction with
timers and DMA. There can be reasons for things like that is not done,
but would still be useful.

One problem that I have seen in the past with things like these, is
that the tool chains is to hard to install, or lacking documentation.

Looking at the MCU market, the ships is almost "free" like in free
beer, but time-consuming to configure and to read through the
documentation, weird installations, and custom programmers. Arduino
solved that, by adding a 10 times the real cost, to solve the weird
issues with MCU designs, like not having a convenient way to program
the chips, expensive C compilers, and lacking ways to expand RAM and
Program Memory. If you can start it from a SD card, and add SDRAM to
the MCU, only there would be a great improvement, and would greatly
reduce the final cost for a product, by getting to market fast,
without the arduino bloat.

And if the tool chain was working out of the box, that J2 would be a killer.

I get the impression, that the engineers using MCU:s are quite
unwilling to change what type of MCU they are using. And I think it's
because the tool-chains tend to be a pain to set up. And thats
probably why those FPGA companies, can sell expansive licenses for
their "own" soft cores. People cant get their head around how to use
anything else, and they need that C-compiler.

Thanks for making this available. It's looks like one of the most
promising projects I have ever seen. Please let us know, where help is
needed, or wanted or justified.

// Daniel V.