Basic VHDL Development kit

"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@proxy01.news.clara.net...

Maybe something here? :o)

--
Regards,
Richard.

+ http://www.FreeRTOS.org
13 official architecture ports, 1000 downloads per week.

+ http://www.SafeRTOS.com
Certified by TÜV as meeting the requirements for safety related systems.

You'd have thought there would have been something but it all seems thin on the ground. I managed to dig out an old lattice development kit at work but someone's had the board away and just left the books.

Cypress do cheapish CPLD dev kits so perhaps that might be a better road to follow - VHDL is the same on CPLDs and FPGAs, right? I might even have a copy or Warp somewhere around.

Have a look at our range

We may have some old rev Raggedstone1s coming onto Ebay in the next few days with either a small or no reserve. We found some in a box that didn't get sold.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

If the objective is to learn vhdl, all you need is

1. A simulator to verify and debug the uut and testbench code and
2. Quartus or ise to view the rtl schematic.

If the objective is to toggle a few output pins, then buy a board and run the demos.

-- Mike Treseler

I've recently been learning VHDL myself and have found GHDL to be quite useful and *free* with-out all that dreadful IDE stuff. Combined with gtkwave under Linux, it is a nice little system. ymmv.

-- Michael N. Moran (h) 770 516 7918

5009 Old Field Ct. (c) 678 521 5460 Kennesaw, GA, USA 30144

"So often times it happens, that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key." "Already Gone" by Jack Tempchin (recorded by The Eagles)

The Beatles were wrong: 1 & 1 & 1 is 1

Try this out for really cheap boards for beginners -

also try this for some "fun projects" -

Good solution is a Aldec Active-HDL 7.2 SE (student edition). Very good simulation and verification tool. Nice schematic diagrams, easy waveform manipulation. Very good choice (personal opinion) for learning. Moreover, for this purposes it is free :)

"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@proxy01.news.clara.net...

No affiliation by the way.

Red

I'll keep an eye out for those then.

The Pluto 3 looks like just the thing. Are they available from a UK supplier or do I need to look at getting one imported?

Has to be shipped to UK.

see -

$10 seems reasonable enough for shipping. Hopefully my credit card won't sting me for using foreign currency.

Yes, however, to someone who hasn't done it before, not taking the effort through to hardware leaves out part of the feeling of the experience.

It just all makes more sense when you see the lights blinking. After you've done that, playing with the simulator is a very powerful, time saving tool. But sometimes "wasting" a few hours with real hardware is a precondition to being willing to work in simulation alone for weeks.

IMHO, in terms of vendor sold/endorsed boards, Xilinx has the best hobbyist or self-funded-training offerings via Digilent. The plain spartan 3 kit is dated at this point but still easy to use, and inexpensive, still $100 as far as I know, though if buying another I'd get the biggest chip offered rather than the default.

I'm inclined to agree. A project just isn't right without a good electric shock or a soldering iron burn :-) I started out in hardware design so I always prefer to play with bits and pieces where possible because simulators are a little joyless.

I'll check those out, although the Probe 3 kit ratemonotonic suggested also looks to be pretty good. I've heard that Xilinx are the Microsoft of the FPGA world and behave similarly - I don't know if that is true though.

Simulation is good clean fun for me, but if solder is your thing, have at it.

-- Mike Treseler

Oh yes... the 75 cent radio control truck from the tag sale. Never did get it going, but learned to solder and launched an EE career. The burns healed fairly quickly...

There might be an element to it, but the major difference is that Xilinx has to contend with Altera as first-rank competition, in a way that Microsoft at present doesn't. That keeps something of a lid on things, though not as much as one might wish for.

You can control your degree of vendor lock in fairly easy - if you don't use their unique library functions, and use only the free download versions of the tools, and don't utilize any abuses of the language that one tool or the other might permit, then you should remain portable.

...and far less efficient than you could be if you designed to the architecture. Now that doesn't necessarily mean instantiating primitives, but it does play into how you architect your design so that it makes best use of the target FPGA structure. Not doing this may lead to a design that is far larger and slower than one that is specifically designed to the architecture.

I thought we were talking about exploration and initial learning, not making products.

I mostly agree. Every design has different constraints. In my experience, reuse, straightforward simulation and clean code has been more valuable than maximum Fmax and minimum LUTs. But I understand that there are others designing on the edge that have to sacrifice some reuse for performance or utilization.

-- Mike Treseler