xilinx or altera?

Xilnix and Altera (and Atmel, Lattice, Actel, etc) are all _companies_ with _families_ of FPGA products.

X and A are the top dogs and both provide very capable tools that are "free" for a subset of their FPGA products. It's not clear what your asking and it's naive to imagine that there would be a simple correct answer (as both companies are in business and doing quite well).

Both Quartus II (Altera) and ISE WebPACK (Xilinx) are way beyond "enough for general work"; you could make a living using nothing but these tolos. If you're familiar with one, it will take little effort to learn the other. Most likely what will drive your decision is the availability of development kits.

IMO: I much prefer Quartus II, but the Spartan-3E Starter Kit offers by far the best value (at $149).

Now, go design :-)

Tommy

You may as well ask whether to go with Christianity or Islamic faith! ;)

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266

The only meaningful responses you're likely to get are from people that have reasonable *practical* experience with *both*!

Actually I'd be interested to know the preferences of people in this category. I've done a few years work with Altera and have recently cracked open ISE to play with a Spartan-3. I'm finding it an unpleasant experience but I'm sure that I went through similar over the years when getting my head around Quartus too?!? So I admit I'm biased atm...

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266

It depends on what you want to do, how you want to do it and, to no negligeable extent, your personnal preferences.

Altera has had PLLs in its FPGAs for a long time and they are fully supported by Altera's Quartus Web Edition. Xilinx introduced PLLs in the V5 family but these are not supported by ISE Webpack yet. If you curse DCMs (grainy clock adjustments) and swear by PLLs, Altera is the only "free" game in town.

Since you say this is for learning, I suggest you download both Quartus Web and ISE Webpack, try them for a while and THEN decide which side you prefer.

That said, I have yet to touch an Altera device. I have recently started using Quartus since I have an upcoming IP validation/integration job coming up and the initial tests will be done on a Cyclone-2.

As far as development software goes, ISE has more eye-candy, leaks memory and crashes much more often than I would like it to. For Quartus, the interface has a somewhat rougher feel to it and I have not played with it long enough to see how sturdy it is. On the ease-of-use side, I think both are about equally easy to use but ISE has become somewhat less intuitive over the last few versions.

Whichever side you pick, the rest is all about getting intimate with your chosen FPGA familyies' architecture and your synthesis tools to get the most out of the pair... or anything at all when you run into corner cases, synthesis bugs, tool crashes, etc. (Are these less common with Quartus?)

--
Daniel Sauvageau
Matrox Graphics Inc.
1155 St-Regis, Dorval, Qc, Canada
514-822-6000

From my experience I would suggest that you first try and get pricing for small order quantities. If X (A) parts are easily/readily available in small order quantities where you live then download the web tools and start coding.

The worst thing you can do is start coding for a particular manufacturers parts only to realise that they are not available where you live

Ben

I'm going through the same thing, except that I _clearly_ remember how difficult I found it to use Altera's stuff. I think all this software is used by such a tiny number of people that you're just expected to get the ritual tattoos and piercings in order to join the cult that understands it. Since the developer community for each product is so small, usability is no priority at all.

I wrestled with ISE for more than an hour just trying to put down something other than an ACC_16. At that time, I discovered that if you open ISE at 1024x768 resolution, the controls autosize themselves in such a way that the drop-down list to select a different part is invisible.

I've yet to be convinced that the software is even functional...

There are things to dislike in each vendor's tools. The download size for the Xilinx webpack (full install - see below) is close on 1GByte - that's not a typo. Although Quartus is smaller, the memory footprint to do anything is horrendous.

The reason for a full download is that the web install fails regularly with a message that the Xilinx server can not be found and perhaps I should check my internet connection - the problem is with the Xilinx servers, not my connection (I checked and it happens multiple times).

That said, there are other things - Altera insists on knowing your ethernet card MAC address (old habits die hard) even for the freely downloadable version, and they install a daemon (service in W2K) that does not need to be there. (jtagserver is the name of said service).

All in all, the tools are roughly the same - Altera can have ease of use (once you get used to them), but far fewer freebies (at least as far as I can find) and horrendous performance (even on this system with

2GByte physical DDR); Xilinx tools have a less than natural flow, but I do like the fact that Xilinx ships FPGA Express.

I have had designs where the native tools could not fit a design where FPGA Express could - it at least gives me another option.

So from my point of view, there's not much between the vendors when you take everything into account.

Cheers

PeteS

One more thing - the update from ISE 7.1 to 8.1 completely changed a lot of things, making me try to figure out where everything had gone. A 'legacy' mode would have been nice for when I was dealing with a fairly large design from an older unit so I didn't waste hours on end just trying to figure out where all the menu items went (this goes for the accessories too).

If you are starting, then you merely have to learn the existing tool, but it is less useable (imo) than the previous versions.

Cheers

PeteS

One last comment.... ifound the support from xilinx as very very good really excellent!!!! Dont know about altera but i dont think they can match that! But the related to supply of HW or related stuffs got a very poor response! regards Sumesh

Sumesh

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