RE: FPGA and Verilog: Beginner's View

michaelkellett — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 09:35:01 GMT

Whoever told you that Verilog is a better starting point than VHDL is just SO wrong. I started with VHDL and have been forced ( by demands of some bought in IP) to use Verilog quite recently. I'll try to be objective:

VHDL is very strongly typed - this means that it tends to choke on most mistakes very early in the process since they won't compile or simulate

Verilog is weakly typed and while it's behaviour when you make a little error is well defined it may be far from obvious.

VHDL comes in many versions but the latest important one (2008) is supported by most tools.

Verilog comes as Verilog and System Verilog, System Verilog is quite nice but support is patchy. System Verilog provides several ways of doing basic things which can be very confusing.

Many have started with Verilog and many with VHDL - either is useable.

For what it's worth I think that VHDL's connection with the hardware is MUCH easier to visualise and this helps a lot in getting you to design logic rather than attempting to write C for hardware (which doesn't work very well in VHDL or Verilog).

I know you have the Spartan board but I wouldn't start there - take a look at Lattice's ultra cheap boards too.(ICE40-HX1k-ICESTICK or LCMXO2280C-B-EVN) both boards under £20 from Farnell and supported by free tools. (I'm always banging the drum for Lattice because I use their parts which are so often ignored because people just look at A and X first - but neither A nor X are putting any resource into supporting low cost simple parts while Lattice and MicroSemi are.)

If you have any specific problems re. VHDL or FPGA I'll be happy to help if I can.