Altera FPGA's

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in programming Altera FPGA's? In particular a FLEX8000. What development environment do you use and how much does it cost? Do any free development environments exist for it (VHDL or Verilog)? Also, is the programming hardware expensive?

Thanks for any info,

The flex series is outdated, choose another one. There is an application note on how to build a Byteblaster parallelport adapter. Basically a '244 plus a set of resistors and capacitors. There are also alternative sources in case you don't have the time to build one.

Rene

"Ed" wrote in message news:cdjh0q$uvr$ snipped-for-privacy@news8.svr.pol.co.uk...

particular

Verilog)?

Sure, quite a lot of people have LOTS of experience in programming Altera FPGA's. Millions of FPGA chips that Altera sells are somehow being used and programmed by people, right? Back to your question. FLEX8000 series are now outdated and it is strongly advised not to start a new design with them as you may not be able to find them in the market with ease. However, if you already have a number of them in stock, surely you can use them with ease. The flagship design software of Altera, Quartus, does not support these old devices and you should try their old series of the design software named "Max Plus II". There is a free version of it available on the Altera's website but it only supports two devices from this series: EPF8452A and EPF84282A. For the other devices of the 8000 series you need the full version of the Max Plus II but buying it is not a good idea as it is now replaced by Quartus and will not be evolved any longer. The free version of the software does not have a VHDL or Verilog compiler and synthesizer and only supports schematics and also altera's own language "AHDL". However, if you already have a third-party synthesizer like Synplify, you can use them as they support this series. You don't program a Flex8000 device. They are SRAM based devices that read the configuration data when they power on. Altera makes small, 8 pin serial EEPROMs that you can program them with the programming files from Max Plus II and then connect them to the 8000 device. The old EEPROMs of altera needed special programmers (or you could use an Universal Programmer) but there is also a new series of these devices (based on Flash memory) that can be programmed using a simple JTAG cable. One example is EPC1 device. For prototypoing, you can ofcourse forget about the programming and just use a JTAG cable to directly configure the 8000 device from a computer. You can build a JTAG cable by yourself and you can find the details and schematics in Altera's application notes. Anyway, the best advice I can give you is to forget about the Flex8000 series and switch to a new family like Cyclone (or alternatively Spartan series from Xilinx). One big advantage will be that the freely available developement programs from both Xilinx and Altera come with a VHDL/Verilog compiler/synthesizer and you need not to worry about the availability of the device for a couple of years.

Regards Arash