Online VHDL Tutorial?

You might try smoe of these links:

Good Luck! Rich

That gives me the usual suspects, with no grading on quality of content. I was hoping to tap the group's collective experience.

Is this Physics/Electronics site as interesting as it looks to someone who doesn't speak Italian?

Robert

In message , dated Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Robert writes

Looks like it. But the text page on the 'frankfurter' test for mobile phone emissions is dreadful; full screen width, no paragraphs.

Are you trying to learn the entire language or just the synthesizable subset? It might make a difference. I learned the synthesizable subset first from a book (someone swiped it so I don't have its name handy) and then the "rest" from Ashenden[*], which is a horrible place to start but a great language reference. I keep it on the desk behind me.

You also might try asking in comp.arch.fpga or comp.lang.vhdl.

What I found useful, as a first introduction, was Smith's HDL Chip Design. It is old enough, now, that it should be available used. But in includes side-by-side pages of VHDL and Verilog, as well as a good introduction about the history and development, so that you can really get a pretty good idea about many important facets fairly quickly. It helped me.

I don't know of anything on the web, though.

Jon

There are a couple of tutorials and/or e-books available on the web, findable by googling obvious search terms.

For paper books, I found Skahill's _VHDL for Programmable Logic_ , also old, quite useful. Smith doesn't present the material in a way that I found as useful. It's really good if you can take a look at these books before buying one, or perhaps buy several in the expectation that some will work better for you than others.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Thanks, Spehro, for the additional comments. I also have several of Bhasker's books, Rushton, and Chang. But I read those after Smith. Where Smith also helped me is in all the various concepts that are probably pretty basic to serious designers, but not to someone starting at this from outside of electronic design, such as Booth's and LFSRs, etc. I did really find the side by side comparison of VHDL and Verilog as absolutely essential for me "getting the point" of either of them. Without that comparison made manifest and easy, I would have struggled much harder to gather the basic ideas needed in order to think in the right frame for either of the languages. Which is why I'd recommend finding a book that does NOT focus on just one, or the other. Comparison material really did help me more quickly get the ideas into a larger context.

Do you know of another book that teaches both at the same time?

Thanks, Jon

FWIW, you could download Xilinx's WebPack:

It comes with some nice tutorials and examples, although it doesn't try to teach VHDL, just how to do a CPLD.

Good Luck! Rich

I already have another Xilinx toolset that runs exclusively on my PC without the web claptrap.

Jon