Board Design

..?

When it comes to the actual device-level circuit design, there's no difference.

However _logic_ creation is an entirely different discipline.

...Jim Thompson

Earlier Spartans, S2's I think, had insane powerup issues. The chip looked like a farad-range capacitor that you had to charge up hard to get it going, and an apparently adequate voltage regulator could stall and never get the beasts started. The Spartan 3's don't do this, and have no sequencing rules. But modern fpga's are surprisingly analog inside, in that they have a lot of "electrical" issues.

It's cool to be able to walk between domains, to do stuff like use a digital multiplier instead of an mdac or a mixer, or a dds instead of a vco, or make a delta-sigma dac for a few cents. I had an interesting calibration problem and, instead of trimpots or whatever, we did the cal math in the fpga, including a divide!

If I had to chose between knowing analog stuff well, and then learning digital, or the other way around, I'd for sure want to do the analog first. Digital design is pretty much bean counting.

John