What's Stopping You Building Your Next Project with an FPGA? (Please, Don't Blame the Cost!)

If I had a good project for FPGA's I would use them.

To give you a perspective, back in the 1970's I did Bit Slice design, which is kind of the precursor to FPGA's.

If I was a newbie, I would first buy a Cypress Semiconductor PSOC board and use their software to learn how to build complex hardware circuits using their programmable devices, both analog and digital.

You can consider the PSOC as a simple FPGA device.  It will give you a feel for the level of detail you need to understand and provide you with useful experience in implementing custom hardware.

After you learn the terminology and get a feel for the design process, then you can move on to a full FPGA with a better understanding of what you are getting into.

Make no mistake, you will have to be able to deal with a large amount of detailed information to go just beyond the tutorials.

Why bother?  The reward in capability is HUGE!  Once you get proficient, you can make all kinds of complex hardware devices within the FPGA constraints.  You are now in the upper echelon of makers.

If you are a good maker, have the basic electronics background and like to work on complex problems, then an FPGA can be very rewarding.  You will forever free from having to look for just the right chip.  You can roll your own.

DAB

If I had a good project for FPGA's I would use them.

To give you a perspective, back in the 1970's I did Bit Slice design, which is kind of the precursor to FPGA's.

If I was a newbie, I would first buy a Cypress Semiconductor PSOC board and use their software to learn how to build complex hardware circuits using their programmable devices, both analog and digital.

You can consider the PSOC as a simple FPGA device.  It will give you a feel for the level of detail you need to understand and provide you with useful experience in implementing custom hardware.

After you learn the terminology and get a feel for the design process, then you can move on to a full FPGA with a better understanding of what you are getting into.

Make no mistake, you will have to be able to deal with a large amount of detailed information to go just beyond the tutorials.

Why bother?  The reward in capability is HUGE!  Once you get proficient, you can make all kinds of complex hardware devices within the FPGA constraints.  You are now in the upper echelon of makers.

If you are a good maker, have the basic electronics background and like to work on complex problems, then an FPGA can be very rewarding.  You will forever free from having to look for just the right chip.  You can roll your own.

DAB

DAB  wrote:

 

To give you a perspective, back in the 1970's I did Bit Slice design, which is kind of the precursor to FPGA's.

 

If I was a newbie, I would first buy a Cypress Semiconductor PSOC board and use their software to learn how to build complex hardware circuits using their programmable devices, both analog and digital.

 

You can consider the PSOC as a simple FPGA device.  It will give you a feel for the level of detail you need to understand and provide you with useful experience in implementing custom hardware.

 

I wouldn't recommend PSoC as a good starter device.  PSoC is really an on-chip collection of devices, which are connected by a routing network.  Those devices include a CPU (ARM Cortex M0/M3 for PSoC 4/5), a bunch of PLAs, a bunch of 8-bit bit-slice ALUs, a bunch of analog, and so on.  You don't need to learn about all the devices, but at the very least you need to learn about the CPU and the logic if you want to do FPGA-like things.  So it's at least two learning curves.

For starting out, I'd go with a pure FPGA board like the Lattice iCEstick, which has a built-in USB programmer, 5 LEDs, UART connections, and enough header pins to get started.  It seems to be readily available these days for around $25.  There are plenty of other choices as well: Not-as-expensive FPGA Boards

I almost agree, I wouldn't go to PSOC to learn about FPGA and the Lattice FPGAs are nice and simple, cheap and easy to understand .......

but recently I've been using Altera and the free tools and the documentation are just so much better.

So now I think its an even call between a cheap Altera MAX10 board or a Lattice ICE40 board.

If you think you'll get as far as making your own boards the parts are sufficiently different that in any given project one will be  abetter call than other.

MK

Michael,

The MAX10 family look like good parts.  I might consider them for a future project.  Please let me know if you hear about any open-source tools for Altera parts or reverse-engineering projects.  I had a good experience with Intel UV-erasable CPLDs circa 1990 (Intel was a second-source for Altera parts) and good experience with Altera 6000 series circa 2000.  They still had AHDL (Altera HDL) which I liked a lot better than Verilog or VHDL.

I can't speak for or against the Lattice iCE40 tools since I've only used the open-source IceStorm suite.  They're simple command-line tools with no GUI and minimal documentation.