Hi there!
I need some advice. I want to make a circuit to drive a VGA monitor. I've done it with the FPGA trainer boards with Xilinx chips, but now I want to design a custom board that host only the necessary circuitry to do so and not depend on eval boards with lot of stuff I don't need.
I've got already a bit experience on designing PCBs, I get pretty much along with the EagleCad, I've build mostly boards with microcontrollers and simply stuff. But now for what I see, handling FPGA is a completely different thing.
For what I've been reading, FPGA need a lot of requirements, 50-ohms impedance for some clock traces, copper layer thickness, lots of different power planes,... heck, there is even some excel spreasheet from altera to calculate power supply stage decoupling caps =S
Now I realize this might be a project beyond my current training, however, I want to give it a shot. I just need the basics: voltage regulators, configuration ROM, 50MHz clock, downloading cable interface; and of course, the VGA dac and some extra broke out pins to interface a microcontroller.
Now, my question is... from the two FPGA biggest names, Altera and Xilinx, which one do you think would be easier to implement? Like in the programming interface, in meeting the power requirements, clock sources, etc...
I mean, it's not that I want to start a flame war, I suppose there must be one superior in this particular aspect, or maybe not, and both are equally easy/difficult to use.
And of course, as a last thought, if you thing I better should stick with a demo board and leave this for the future when I get to study more about transmision lines, advanced CAD tools, etc...
Regards
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