Hi Everyone

I repair circuit boards for a living. I am third party and normally do not have access to schematics and I never have access to FPGA programs/firmware source.

I am managing but one thing that is very hard for me is FPGA chips. I think they can be copied as there are knock off boards on the market as well but I don't know how to do this.

I don't know very much about FPGA design and I would like to figure out a solution. I have a logic analyzer and I believe that the FPGA chips used on the boards I service have fairly basic roles. I think most/all of them are used for address bus expansion and that they do not have microcontrollers embedded within the FPGAs.

Do you think it would be suicide to monitor the pins on an FPGA and then try to reproduce the functionality with a microcontroller soldered to a little PCB to replace an FPGA ?

I figure that this route would be more straight forward then getting setup to burn FPGA chips. I already have eprom burners that could be used with various microcontrollers.

Any feedback would be most welcome! Thanks for reading

 

FPGAs route a lot of signals very fast and can do many jobs simultaneously. Microcontrollers work slowly in comparison, and tend to do one task at a time (though peripheral hardware can do limited functions independently and in parallel)

Forget the idea right now

 

FPGA are a whole lot more complicated than micros.

Also. Micros have a lot more utility. That is why they were created in the first place. Which, in turn, means that FPGA were created for a reason, the micros are not as good at the job or not suitable to the job at all.

 

Hi hexreader, Hi shteii01

Thanks very much. Okay, I won't go down this road, thanks for steering me clear of danger