On Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:05:14 +0100
Lars Poetter <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I would like to ask you to stop pushing ideas around and start doing
> > something. Like writing some letters, meeting people and getting a big
> > investor. Or doing some verilog coding. There are also drivers that
> > need to be written... etc. Timothy will for sure be happy to give you
> > a list of things that need to be done.
>
> I don't know big Investors, so I have no one to write letters to and I
> have never ever coded verilog. So that leaves me with nothing to do to
> help.
Not knowing something doesn't mean you cannot aquire the skills.
> I would like to start programming FPGAs. But I don't know where to
> start.
Pick up a good book, read it. Decide what small project you'd like
to do and start coding :-)
I currently would recomend to go for "Digital Design - An Embedded
Systems Approach" by Peter Ashenden. There is both a Verilog and
a VHDL version of that book. For starting, i would recomend VHDL
over Verilog. Although VHDL is a lot more verbose than Verilog,
it has a lot clearer structure and prevents you from a lot of
typos and small mistakes that are very hard to spot in Verilog.
Learning Verilog later is like learning Java when you know C++.
The base concepts are the same, there is some difference in syntax
and a few in semantics, but nothing major.
When you go the VHDL road you should definitly get "The Designers Guide
to VHDL" also by Ashenden, no matter what other book you buy.
It's The Book for VHDL. It contains all the gorry details in a simple
and easy to understand language. Including a lot of the traps with lots
of examples how to actually design circuits. (I have yet to find
a book of similar quality for Verilog)
You can find quite a few examples of code on the opencores website[3],
for both Verilog and VHDL. But the quality of those varies a lot.
For the impatient, you can find a very simplified overview of different
electronic circuits and their description in VHDL in [4]. This can
serve as an reference guide and can you get started, but is not
enough to learn VLSI design.
> I do embedded C Programming and for those that want to start
> embedded C Programming it is now easy, because they can start with an
> Arduino. If there is an FPGA-Arduino the please give me an pointer. If
> there isn't, then creating one would probably be a big step towards your
> target of more skilled People.
There are several of them. A quite comprehensive list can be found
at [1]. I quite like the DE0-Nano from terasic[2]. But there are others
that are cheaper than that one, and probably better fit your needs.
You don't have to check the size of the FPGA for any of those boards,
as it is very unlikely that you will run out of logic blocks with
your first couple of projects. But you should ensure it comes with
"batteries included". Ie contain power supply, cables and stuff around it.
Makes life a lot easier.
Attila Kinali
[1] http://tristesse.org/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards
[2] http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=593
[3] http://opencores.org/projects
[4] http://www.actel.com/documents/hdlcode_ug.pdf
--
There is no secret ingredient
-- Po, Kung Fu Panda
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