Marvin Dickens wrote:
On Friday 27 May 2005 07:22 pm, Martin Bammer wrote:
Hi,
I can recommend SpartanII and Spartan3. These chips are quite cheap and
powerful. A development system under Linux is available since a few months.
It's free. I recommend to set kate as an external editor, because it's so
much better to work with. At the moment I prefer SpartanII because they
only need 2 different supply voltages. Spartan3 needs 3, which leads to a
much more complex design. Because you are a beginner you should buy a
starter kit. If you plan to create complex designs you REALLY should learn
VHDL. VHDL programming is possible (and very comfortable) with the IDE from
Xilinx.
I second Martins suggestion to learn VHDL. Regarding who's silicon to
purchase, I mostly work with Altera. But, that's not to say Xilinx does not
have good products - They do. FWIW, I seem to recall that a couple of AVR
processors have been implimented in fpga's. I believe that I saw the projects
at opencores.org. If my memory serves me correctly, at least one of them
claimed to have a 3X increase in speed as compared to the atmel offerings.
Even if this is not exactly accurate, I'd still bet you could massage out a
lot of I/O pins using this route.
Hmm. This makes me want to load a chip and see how well it
plays with gcc. That would be a hoot :)
Having learnt and used vhdl on xilinx spartanII in depth using webpack, and used
vhdl on altera acex, i found vhdl an overly verbose, inflexible, poorly designed
and cumbersome language. It is a pascal/ada like language. They say verilog
is a C-like language. I'd rather learn that next time than touch vhdl with
a barge pole. Also useful to read news:comp.arch.fpga
_______________________________________________
AVR-GCC-list mailing list
AVR-GCC-list@nongnu.org
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-gcc-list
