Where to start???

A book: (one of very many, this one is used by UC Berkeley) R. H. Katz, Contemporary Logic Design, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA, 1993.

A source of stuff that universities and colleges actually use so you may find their course materials on line and follow along)

Such as: (one of hundreds)

Austin

And,

I forgot to mention that the cost of the Digilent (Spartan series) pcb's is designed to be like the cost of a textbook (but re-usable), so every student can afford one, and take their pcb through more than just one class (logic design, processor architectures, interfacing, etc...)

Austin

...

The following site shows how to use Verilog with lots of simple but instructive examples. Additionally there are references to short and efficient verilog and vhdl courses on the net:

A very good short introduction to Verilog is (in my opinion):

Introduction to Verilog, Peter M. Nyasulu

Using the two references above I was able to complete some small designs (4x7 Segment LED, PS/2 Keyboard reader, VGA with text-output) in a very short time (with ISE WebPack and a Spartan 3 evaluation board from Digilent/Xilinx)

If you want to find more infos, look at my linkpage:

A very thorough self learning course for Verilog on the web is:

It covers also the aspects of Verilog as a simulation language - I have just leafed through it a little, but it is provided as an add-on to the book of Patterson and Hennessy, "Computer Organization and Design", so it should be of high quality.

Greetings

Jürgen

--
Jürgen Böhm                                            www.aviduratas.de
"At a time when so many scholars in the world are calculating, is it not
desirable that some, who can, dream ?"  R. Thom

Ouch.. ;)

*) Learn the language (grab a decent book and read at least one fully) *) View some code examples *) Play with the free tools (actel, xilinx, altera etc..) *) Learn some basic electronics. *) Buy a development board ($50-$150) *) Play with the board..

Some things here

that might held starting you off. If you want development boards then we have those too.

For the must have cheaper addicts out there we have a special version of one of our Craignell modules coming that will support a power jack and arguably be the cheapest FPGA development board in the market. It should give the CPLD boards serious competition in price along with the 5V tolerance/CMOS compatability Craignell modules already offer.

John Adair Enterpo> Hi,

Thanks very much for your information everybody. It doesn't seem too daunting when you're surrounded by people who know what they're talking about! :)

Re: Digilents tutorials, although the four they've got are fantastic, they seem a little sparse, also the remaining categories other than tutorials in the education section says "check back in the coming week", does anybody have any ideas on when this may be updated?

John, thanks for the site, the UK makes it a bit more accessible for me. ;)

Thanks again everybody. It is much appreciated.