> 
> 
> Are any of you guys into FPGA development? What are
> the main applications do you use it for? I will be
> entering into FPGA once I have cleared my other
> development, counting 2 major PIC projects.
> 
> Regards,
> John
> 

All my recent experience has been with Xilinx and Quartus so I'm
limiting responses to what they offer.  Other companies like Lattice,
Atmel and so forth also have tool chains.

The tools available from the major vendors are pretty good.  Xilinx ISE
and Altera Quartus are pretty good.  Both come with simulators, but of
somewhat limited ability.  A good gate level simulator is pretty
expensive.

Both companies offer reasonably inexpensive development boards as do
LOTS of third parties.  

A good place to browse will be www.fpga4fun.com  also www.opencores.org
(Google for "opencores" to confirm that one).

You have your choice of schematic capture, VHDL or Verilog.  Or you can
combine them.  Other development "languages" such as Handel-C are
available but generally not free.  Abel and Abel-like languages are also
available free.  

I typically use VHDL but I know a lot of people who prefer Verilog.  In
theory, anything you can do in one language you can do in the other.  If
properly constructed, both should reduce down to the same gate level
implementation.

Both Xilinx and Altera have lots of extra tools for optimizing, pin
selection, I/O drive etc.  You can use these tools or just create the
configuration files yourself with a text editor and run from a command
line instead of the company's idea of a good IDE.

Start small, and see if you decide to go with VHDL, the best book I have
found is Essential VHDL RTL Synthesis Done Right by Sundar Rajan.  VHDL
is kinda funny in that you can write perfectly legal code that cannot be
synthesized.  It will run in a simulator but cannot be made to run in
silicon.  

Rob 
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