I like to start FPGA but I have access to a CPLD traning kit .
I would like to know :
1-If I start with CPLD (XC9572 the training kit has it ) can I later work with FPGA (Spartan 2,3) ? 2-Does these two have much defferent Hardware design ? 3-Are ISE & VHDL have much defference ?
Yes.
Yes, they use different low-level blocks to implement a design.
As long as you use VHDL, only, without special entities of the hardware (like block RAM or DCM), it compiles for every CPLD and FPGA, if there are sufficient number of logic elements to synthesize it.
-- Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Look at it this way:
What you need to know to do good work with FPGAs, CPLDs, or ASIC, for that matter, is a firm grounding in _logic_ design. You can get that from CPLDs, or from big conglomerations of 74xx parts, for that matter (although I don't know of any Verilog-to-74xx synthesizers). You'll run into some detail differences when you move to a different technology (such as an FPGA), but you'll still be doing _logic_ design.
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/ "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April. See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
Tim gave you a great answer. I just want to add that a small CPLD like the XC9572 is very small compared to an FPGA. The '72' is 72 flops. The smallest Spartan 3E has over 2000. I didn't appreciate this gap when I built my first proto board with a CPLD.
Not that much.
By the way, have you seen the Spartan 3 starter kit?
-- Ben Jackson AD7GD http://www.ben.com/
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