Learning FPGA PCB design and HDL coding

Hello

I did quite a bit on VHDL & Spartan 3 FPGA at uni 6 years ago.

As a learning experience (to cover designing both PCB's for FPGA's and writing HDL code) I want to design a pcb from scratch and write HDL code.
I'm thinking of a PCB with a camera an FPGA and a display.
The display shows what the camera sees and the FPGA performs video processing effects on the video.

Could anyone suggest a good starting point?

- Not sure xillinx -vs altera?
- Thoughts on who has best documention for beginers - walkthrus ideally?
- Want to buy a cheap dev board (Ideally less than £50) to get a taste of writing verilog/vhdl
- Want to avoid spending £200 on a debugger to use when I make my board in the future
- Any particular free online courses in FPGA development?

Would really appreciate any advice

Thanks a lot
Jamie

Look like you want to have a business lesson than technique.

About camera and display, let think about video quality, size... that you want to record and display. Depends on those inputs, your design work load can be identified.
Also the suitable components will be narrow into some smaller series.

Then, you need FPGA board that has correct connector which is compatible with your display and camera. Xilinx has a kit like that but it is quite expensive.
Of course there are online store of both Xilinx and Altera about board and its features.
In my opinion, it will take you more time to handle EDA like Vivado, ModelSim...to work with all design flow once you set down the component.

Whats your budget for designing and building a PCB? they are not cheap (£1000s or £10000s to get the layout and manufacture done on a single board), plus the licence costs for the expensive tools.

I would stick with FPGA design.

Hi well I am a hardware designer by trade so will design the board myself.
I was hoping if I avoid 0.4mm bga so that I could avoid microvia pcb. Also I will only use a fraction of the fpga pins so hopefully could be a 4/6 layer board (maybe thats a totally wrong assumption!)
I was hoping to get pcbs made from my gerbers for £300/400
Also, more hoping here, that I could use a free version of a design tool in a similar way that I use the kickstarter version of IAR to get the full development environment for free.
I was thinking the availability of free maybe 'lite' versions of the softyware tools would inform my choice of xillinx over altera..

Use a 7series part if you design with Xilinx, probably Artix, this will allow you to use the free webpack edition of Vivado, which has a mixed mode simulator, and the debug tools (equivalent to the ISE Chipscope) available. Both are included and don't require that you pay extra for them. Here is the feature breakdown of the tools: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/vivado-webpack.html

The Altera free edition has a starter edition Modelsim that I believe has a severely limited design size and performance (I've never used it due to having full SE or better licenses available). They also have a SignalTap logic analyzer, which basically has to "phone home" to Altera to use it, without buying a license. Here is a feature breakdown of the tools: https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/pdfs/literature/po/ss-quartus-comparison.pdf

Xilinx Artix, Altera Max10 or Lattice MachXO2/03.

I like the MachXO hardware but Xilinx and Altera both have better tools with better simulators (the tools are free for all three of those)

Skip the BGA's and go with a smaller package and its possible to keep your costs down. ExpressPCB.com gets you boards starting at $50.

But are you sure you need to spin your own board? All the above have pretty cheap development kits with all sorts of connectors already on-board.

What's the motivation behind designing your own PCB? What are the quantities you're looking at?
Why isn't an evaluation board enough?

If you really want to design your own board, I thing Xilinx series 7 is not well suited because all packages are BGA. Maybe a series 6, as XC6SLX9 could be used, once it is available in a TQFP package. It does not have a lot of logic, but should be enough to make experiments at home.

With Spartan-6 you will be stuck to the old ISE/Vivado environment, however.

pbernardi said:

With Spartan-6 you will be stuck to the old ISE/Vivado environment, however.

Click to expand...

You mean ISE environment not "ISE/Vivado".
Vivado is the new tool suite that is only for 7 series and above.

ads-ee said:

You mean ISE environment not "ISE/Vivado".
Vivado is the new tool suite that is only for 7 series and above.

Click to expand...

Yes, thank you for the correction. I though in "ISE/PlanAhead" and wrote "ISE/Vivado"for some weird reason.