Hi everyone! I am new to digital design and need some general advice on it.
I have experience with microcontrollers and other chips, but when it comes to designing with FPGAs, I am having difficulty starting moderately complex projects. I am comfortable enough with VHDL that I think I should be able to start solving more advanced problems. VHDL is not the problem.
I think the problem is that I don't know how to design a complex digital system. I tried thinking in software, but it doesn't seem like a good idea, too much time is spent on simple things. The elementary digital design course I took some time ago doesn't seem to help much: knowing basic logic gates/theorems and minimizing equations with K-maps doesn't do me any good.
Currently I am trying to design a system with ADC -> ISSI RAM ->
FFTcore -> ISSI RAM -> DAC.
ADC obtains data, stores it in external SRAM, then FFT core takes this data from RAM and stores its results in another block of RAM. Then the results are output from RAM to DAC.
I need general advice on how to approach the design of this system. Should I start with a block diagram, and try to work out simple blocks of my system?
I already have working code where ADC loads data to FGPA and this data is immediately sent to DAC. I also can read/write from external RAM (as a separate block). But I don't know how to connect the two blocks together. I don't feel like I am spending my time productively at the moment.
Any advice would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Pavel