Beginners advice for selecting an environment for FPGA design

This would be an interesting project and might even make a good project for an advanced class in processor design. If I am not mistaken, there is a web site or sites where others are working on similar projects. I have seen projects on PDP-xx machines as well as others. Certainly this is not a difficult task.

I would recommend that you find a board using a Xilinx FPGA since they provide more complete design tools for free. The current Altera tools do not include an HDL simulator. I am assumming of course that you intend to use an HDL, and I also recommend it.

Here is a list of some FPGA board vendors...

Do a Google search on this and find some of the individuals doing similar projects. I am sure they can give you some good advice.

Also, search this newsgroup using "beginner" to find threads with ideas on how to get started. There was a recent one where sort of listed a suggested set of steps to get going.

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Martin Euredjian

To send private email:

Just to provide some clarification on one of Rick's comments below, an HDL simulation package *is* included with one of our Quartus II subscriptions at no additional cost. Specifically, we provide Model Technology? ModelSim®-Altera for VHDL or Verilog HDL simulation. Have a look at

Hope this helps.

Chris Balough Director, Software and Tools Marketing Altera Corp. snipped-for-privacy@altera.com

To further calrify (:-) - I think Rick's point was that of the "free" tools, Webpack offers Modelsim-XE whereas Quartus offers the built-in simulator only. Unless that's changed since I last looked?

Martin.