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Beginners advice for selecting an environment for FPGA design

Hello all,

I'm thinking about a project to reimplement old processor designs (Symbolics Lisp-machines or a Control-Data cyber 17x, 18x in a chip) using modern programmable hardware, e.g. FPGA's.

The complete hardware documentation for these platform is available.

My knowledge in this task in not up-to-date, as I've not been working on hardware design for almost ten years (onyl software!).

I would like to get some suggestions about a FPGA Development environment and programming system to use for this task. Any other suggestions or links to similar projects are very welcome.

If there are other people interested in such kind of project, please contact me directly.

This is not a commercial project!

Andreas

Reply to
Andreas Holz
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This would be an interesting project and might even make a good project for an advanced class in processor design. If I am not mistaken, there is a web site or sites where others are working on similar projects. I have seen projects on PDP-xx machines as well as others. Certainly this is not a difficult task.

I would recommend that you find a board using a Xilinx FPGA since they provide more complete design tools for free. The current Altera tools do not include an HDL simulator. I am assumming of course that you intend to use an HDL, and I also recommend it.

Here is a list of some FPGA board vendors...

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Do a Google search on this and find some of the individuals doing similar projects. I am sure they can give you some good advice.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX
Reply to
rickman

Also, search this newsgroup using "beginner" to find threads with ideas on how to get started. There was a recent one where sort of listed a suggested set of steps to get going.

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Martin Euredjian

To send private email:

0_0_0_0 snipped-for-privacy@pacbell.net where "0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

Reply to
Martin Euredjian

Just to provide some clarification on one of Rick's comments below, an HDL simulation package *is* included with one of our Quartus II subscriptions at no additional cost. Specifically, we provide Model Technology? ModelSim®-Altera for VHDL or Verilog HDL simulation. Have a look at

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for more details.

Hope this helps.

Chris Balough Director, Software and Tools Marketing Altera Corp. snipped-for-privacy@altera.com

Reply to
Chris Balough

To further calrify (:-) - I think Rick's point was that of the "free" tools, Webpack offers Modelsim-XE whereas Quartus offers the built-in simulator only. Unless that's changed since I last looked?

Martin.

--
martin.j.thompson@trw.com
TRW Conekt, Solihull, UK
http://www.trw.com/conekt
Reply to
Martin Thompson

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