Is there an FPGA that you don't need a computer engineering degree just to get a light to blink?

Hi David,

Which area are you specifically concerned about, the development software (toolchain), or the software that will push the final synthesized design into the board?

Regardless of the board, you will still have to use the same FPGA/CPLD vendor software to test and synthesize your design (this is a broad statement, there are actually alternatives for (say) the testing portion of the workflow, and with the exception of Lattice for which an open source toolchain also exists as far as I know (johnbeetem will know more). It won't necessarily be less complex however).

Regardless of the FPGA/CPLD silicon vendor the only slightly board-specific area of the workflow will be how to get the final bit file onto the board.

Many boards are created by the 'maker community', so if the creator's don't care about the community enough to publish sufficient detail on how to program their board, I cannot see that Altera and Xilinx can be blamed for that.

To get a light to blink, you need to describe the hardware (so you need familiarity with digital logic) and be able to write stimulus and the expected response in order to be able to simulate it, and be able to use the vendor tools to synthesize it and make it fit into the FPGA and pin layout as desired. All of these steps are different to writing and compiling computer programs.

I think the Xlinx and Altera toolchains are not too bad to use (takes a day or so with tutorials to figure out the steps), the difficulty lies in being able to describe hardware in a HDL (hardware description language) and testing it. I have not used Altera software in a very long time though, and Xilinx's ISE is not recent for me either. However the user docs/tutorials for Xilinx seemed straightforward at the time, enough to get my projects to function. There are other vendors too such as Lattice as mentioned.

Regarding boards, for my last project I just used a cheap Xilinx CPLD board and it was possible to push the final synthesized design file (i.e. you of course still need to use Xilinx ISE to actually perform all the previous steps) into it using free software running on the BeagleBone Black.

See here for the free software and the wiring diagram. It is drag-and-drop to program it, so couldn't be easier. It is free so unsupported except for general assistance from the community, i.e. we try our best to help where we can:

BBB - FPGA / CPLD Programmer for the BeagleBone Black

Hi David,

Which area are you specifically concerned about, the development software (toolchain), or the software that will push the final synthesized design into the board?

Regardless of the board, you will still have to use the same FPGA/CPLD vendor software to test and synthesize your design (this is a broad statement, there are actually alternatives for (say) the testing portion of the workflow, and with the exception of Lattice for which an open source toolchain also exists as far as I know (johnbeetem will know more). It won't necessarily be less complex however).

Regardless of the FPGA/CPLD silicon vendor the only slightly board-specific area of the workflow will be how to get the final bit file onto the board.

Many boards are created by the 'maker community', so if the creator's don't care about the community enough to publish sufficient detail on how to program their board, I cannot see that Altera and Xilinx can be blamed for that.

To get a light to blink, you need to describe the hardware (so you need familiarity with digital logic) and be able to write stimulus and the expected response in order to be able to simulate it, and be able to use the vendor tools to synthesize it and make it fit into the FPGA and pin layout as desired. All of these steps are different to writing and compiling computer programs.

I think the Xlinx and Altera toolchains are not too bad to use (takes a day or so with tutorials to figure out the steps), the difficulty lies in being able to describe hardware in a HDL (hardware description language) and testing it. I have not used Altera software in a very long time though, and Xilinx's ISE is not recent for me either. However the user docs/tutorials for Xilinx seemed straightforward at the time, enough to get my projects to function. There are other vendors too such as Lattice as mentioned.

Regarding boards, for my last project I just used a cheap Xilinx CPLD board and it was possible to push the final synthesized design file (i.e. you of course still need to use Xilinx ISE to actually perform all the previous steps) into it using free software running on the BeagleBone Black.

See here for the free software and the wiring diagram. It is drag-and-drop to program it, so couldn't be easier. It is free so unsupported except for general assistance from the community, i.e. we try our best to help where we can:

BBB - FPGA / CPLD Programmer for the BeagleBone Black