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livedesign or ise

Hi,

I am planning to start fpga designing. I am not sure wheather I should start with the livedesign kit from Altium or just with ISE? I want do develop a spread spectrum system. I am not sure yet wheather I want to use an embedded processor or not, but most likely I will.

Can somebody give me some hints?

regards, Benjamin

Reply to
Benjamin Menküc
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embedded

The livedesign kit from Altium comes with a nice proto board. The main claim to fame is that using their tools one can build and test an FPGA without knowing much about any HDL . This is true. Also comes with a few soft CPU cores.

On a down side:

  1. Doesn't understand Verilog.
  2. Compared to a "real" system like ISE or Quartus ... it's a joke. The "virtual tools" are a far cry from say ChipScope.
  3. Eval license is only 30 days. After that you have to buy a ridiculosly expensive full license. By contrast you can do pretty much anything with free ISE.

So it's nice to play with for a beginner, but in the present form IMHO not very useful for *real work*.

Reply to
Alex Freed

Hi,

thank You for that estimation. I think ISE will be the right choice for me. From the web presentation of altium it looked like livedesign's virtual tools are more powerfull than ChipScope, but that seems to be a mistake.

regards, Benjamin

Reply to
Benjamin Menküc

"Benjamin Menküc" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:cvumpu$h13$01$ snipped-for-privacy@news.t-online.com...

me.

it can not be said what is mistake or not

livedesign demos are probably cool, and some of the ChipScope features are available in LiveDesign also, but generically ChipScope is better doing deep FPGA scoping, and defenetly better choice if you are doing mainly Xilinx designs, another thing is that Altium charges 9000 USD for the tools, and ChipScope cost a less than that :)

Antti

Reply to
Antti Lukats

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