digital chips as replacement

[theEgO]

hey all..
i was planning to use a PIC 16F870 for my project which needs to use an ADC. anyway.. i was told that i can also use a digital chip which can replace the 16f870.
can some one update me on this digital chip? what's the difference btwn those 2 and how does it work.. any details regarding this is welcome.
thnx,.

 

[Oznog]

Doesn't make any sense to me. The 16F870 is certainly a digital chip and there is no obvious "replacement" implied by "digital". Could you by any chance mean that the onboard ADC could be replaced with an external ADC chip?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Yes, the 16F870 is a 'digital' chip, it's actually a PIC micro-controller, so you would need to know exactly what it's doing, to know if you could replace it with something else - which sounds extremely unlikely. Unless you replace it with a different micro-controller and write completely new software for it? - but why not just stick to the 870?.

 

[circuitmangler]

The person might have meant a FPGA (field programmable gate array).
You can "re-wire" the internal circuitry of these chips to create a processor
which has special functions.

For example, suppose you need a PIC which has 5 serial ports. You could
"program" an FPGA to use 10 i/o pins as serial port pins.

A FPGA has some number of basic gates (like 10K), which you have at
your disposal. These gates can be reconfigured to create timers, counters,
arithmetic units, registers, decision control circuits, etc. The downside of using FPGAs is that you have to program the CPU itself -- that is, you have
to specify how instructions are handled by your processor.

See fpga4fun.com for some more info.