On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:50:29 -0600, you wrote: >I love the Spartan 3 family of FPGA and use the free xilinx ISE tools for >it. VHDL is a nice language to use, and the book "Designer's Guide to VHDL" >got me far. Also, a great place to buy a nice dev board is >www.digilentinc.com . FPGAs are FUN and I've >used the site FPGA4FUN for reference as I play around. > James Here's another cheap Spartan-3 board, which comes with a bigger chip : http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/raggedstone1.html The Xilinx S3 starter kit one is also good. You can get started with xilinx using schematic entry, although you will probably want to go to VHDL or Verilog fairly quickly, There is an excellent book called 'VHDL for Programmable Logic" by a guy from Cypress, althoiugh it covers all the general stuff. Not sure if it;s still in print. There are also a couple of VHDL tutorials online. One problem with VHDL is that it does a lot of stuff that is not relevant to FPGAs, and so you need to know the subset that can sensibly be used, and have faith that the software tools will figure out what you are trying to do & map it sensibly into the logic.. If you're not doing anything too challenging complexity-wise (so compile/place/route time is reasonable) and speed-wise (so you can assume it will always be fast enough), and are used to a 'write-test-debug' process, it is entirely possible to do without simulation. > On 10/26/05, Robert Young wrote: >> >> >From: "Mario Mendes Jr." >> >Reply-To: "Microcontroller discussion list - Public." >> >To: piclist@mit.edu >> >Subject: [EE] Starting with FPGA >> >Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:37:11 -0400 (EDT) >> > >> >Can anyone recommend an FPGA book, website, dev board for someone with >> >limited electronics experience (me)? Not expensive is key. >> > >> >Limited electronics experience -> self taught, good with digital circuits >> >but couldn't design much analog stuff from scratch without help. I can >> >build pic circuits and program them, but couldn't create a sawtooth >> >generator. >> > >> >Thanks. >> > >> > >> >-Mario >> >> http://www.fpga4fun.com/ has nice tutorials for VHDL and Verilog. He >> describes how to get and install both Quartus (Altera) and ISE (Xilinx) >> but >> information might be a software revision behind. >> >> And he sells at a reasonable price, some fun little FPGA boards. >> >> Site has a forum, moderately active and good advice. >> >> >> Rob >> >> >> -- >> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive >> View/change your membership options at >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist >> -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist