Basics tools for FPGA

[jjeevan007]

hi

i am new to world FPGA

i want to start with FPGA

so tell me what are the software tools and hardware tools that are required to start



regards
jeevan

 

[TrickyDicky]

Well you will need an FPGA, probably on a dev board (there are many to chose from)
And the compiler for that brand of FPGA (Altera Quartus and Xilinx ISE are the main two).

What are you trying to do?

 

[jjeevan007]

just some basic thing like implementing AND gate, OR gate and adders

which are start kit available

 

[TrickyDicky]

I suggest having a look at the websites of altera and xilinx.
Also consider the bemicro sdk **broken link removed**

 

[jjeevan007]

i prefer to go for xilinx products, but in that also there so many things

which is best for starting......

 

[vijaymighty123]

A few answers to your questions
1) Starting point
a) Learn the architecture of FPGA - best source www.xilinx.com
b) In order to implement any circuit you need knowledge of a programming language to program the FPGA - Best language to learn is Verilog. (Cilletti book is good)
c) You need to convert this language (where you model your circuit) into a binary file which can be downloaded on the FPGA - Best tool for this is Xilinx Project Navigator - ISE
d) Best FPGA boards available at www.digilentinc.com. Cheap ones start from 5k INR (I presume you are from India)
e) In case you require additional and professional help I suggest take up an online course. Through personal experience, I underwent online training from WorldServe Education. They give 1:1 live training and it's pretty good and cheap! (Thats important nowadays ). You can look up their website at www.worldserve.in. Any more queries lemme know!

 

[mrflibble]

just some basic thing like implementing AND gate, OR gate and adders

which are start kit available

For a list of dev boards, see: https://tristesse.org/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards

Personally I am rather partial to the Digilent boards since they offer good value for money IMO. If you're serious about this I would advice to get a recent fpga family. For example for xilinx, the price difference between spartan-3 and spartan-6 is such that you would be silly to use spartan-3 for your learning experience. I am not saying spartan-3 doesn't make sense for a new design, but I am saying that if you have to choose on what platform to learn I'd say pick the newer yet-still-affordable one. For one, I like the clocking resources on the spartan-6 a whole lot more than on spartan-3.

As for tools, like TrickyDicky pointed out you'll need the vendor tools. So either xilinx ise or altera quartus for the popular fpga posse. For simulation ... xilinx has it's own builtin simulator which I find adequate for most things. It does not have as many features as say Questasim. As for Altera I vaguely recall that current versions of Quartus come with a bundled version of Modelsim, but not sure about that. I'll leave that to the Altera users. ;-)

And you'll have to pick a language to learn first. So either vhdl or (system) verilog. And depending on your history you may or may not want a better editor for your HDL editing. My personal current gripe is still the lack of decent refactoring and a whole slew of other SIMPLE stuff that you take for granted when coding C++ or java in eclipse or what have you, but those same rather basic features are not present in the more basic tools. Certainly xilinx ISE doesn't have that, and I am pretty sure that Quartus doesn't have that either.

Hell, if it turns out I am blind and Quartus does have refactoring + a doxygen plugin for documentation (*) + good system verilog support for synthesis + UVM support I might just jump ship to Altera land.

(*) Or another good whatever it is to facilitate documentation. Doesn't have to be doxygen, I am not picky.

Anyways, I guess my point there is that if you are planning to do this for more than 1 lab project of your EE course then I recommend looking into a good way to document your HDL projects. So if you can find tools that support your documentation habit I'd say that's a big plus!

Oh, and ...

i prefer to go for xilinx products, but in that also there so many things

which is best for starting......

Personally I bought the Atlys board, but price/performance wise ... if you can get the
at academic pricing I would go for that one. For $119 it definitely has a nice collection of goodies.

The only reason for picking Atlys I can think of right now to justify the price difference is if you are planning to do a project involving HDMI. Or if you absolutely need gigabit ethernet...

 

[ads_ee]

My personal current gripe is still the lack of decent refactoring and a whole slew of other SIMPLE stuff that you take for granted when coding C++ or java in eclipse or what have you, but those same rather basic features are not present in the more basic tools. Certainly xilinx ISE doesn't have that, and I am pretty sure that Quartus doesn't have that either.

Actually had to read up on what refactoring was and ran across this:

**broken link removed**

It claims it will do some simple refactoring.

mrfibble, since I use GVIM I could probably write a refactoring plugin if I was so inclined (which I'm not), but if I become inclined I'll make sure I send you a copy. ;-)


Regards,
-alan

 

[mrflibble]

Actually had to read up on what refactoring was and ran across this:

**broken link removed**

It claims it will do some simple refactoring.

mrfibble, since I use GVIM I could probably write a refactoring plugin if I was so inclined (which I'm not), but if I become inclined I'll make sure I send you a copy. ;-)

Yeah, I know about simplifide. Quite some time ago I took a look at it and it wasn't entirely what I was looking for. But I realize that things may have improved since then so re-evaluating simplifide is on the todo list.

Should I go the gvim route then I'll probably take a tiny detour and go for emacs since the verilog mode looks reasonable. Then again, maybe gvim is even better. I must admit that I did see vim as an option, but didn't even check it out. My unchecked assumption being that everything that the vim has for verilog is probably also in the emacs verilog-mode.

 

[ads_ee]

Vim v.s. emacs

A battle in the making ;-)

I've only used emacs for a short time, didn't care for it much as it was so much different than vi and it's clones (vim). Especially didn't care for having to use the cursor keys to maneuver around the text (I don't like using a mouse for text editing). Using the VI mode in emacs seemed rather silly...using a "bloated" (my opinion only) piece of SW to do the same job as VIM.

YMMV...

I do like the VIM pluggin concept, you can write "programs" to do pretty much anything you want. I've only played around with that feature. Not at all sure emacs has a direct equivalent.


-alan

 

[mrflibble]

Vim v.s. emacs

A battle in the making ;-)

Heheh, more like a skirmish.

I've only used emacs for a short time, didn't care for it much as it was so much different than vi and it's clones (vim). Especially didn't care for having to use the cursor keys to maneuver around the text (I don't like using a mouse for text editing). Using the VI mode in emacs seemed rather silly...using a "bloated" (my opinion only) piece of SW to do the same job as VIM.

Cursor movement has so many options to customize that it's hardly an issue. As you noticed you can use vi style cursor, as well as cursor keys. Personally I use cursor keys since I find that faster to do that ctrl-whatever. Anyways, cursor movement is a bit of a non-issue.

YMMV...

Exactly.

I do like the VIM pluggin concept, you can write "programs" to do pretty much anything you want. I've only played around with that feature. Not at all sure emacs has a direct equivalent.

Emacs has the concept of major and minor modes, which are written in lisp (of all things). Also stuff like keyboard macros. Anyways, think of it as I am more familiar with emacs than with vim, so I'd sooner pick emacs verilog-mode than gvim + plugin. Unless ofcourse gvim has super awesome verilog features that the emacs mode doesn't have...

 

[mrflibble]

Alright, I've been playing a bit with SVEditor and looks nice. Has some features I am looking for, and ofcourse (otherwise things would just be too easy) it is missing some features as well. But so far looks promising. Things like open declaration and show class hierarchy work. With uvm-1.1a installed together with some example code you can then browse through all the UVM classes fairly easily, which is a nice thing.

Documentation is a bit sketchy though...