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Re: Bank transactions on Internet
>>>>> "Jon Leonard" <[email protected]> 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/