FPGA Principles,referrence and tutorial and application

[kingearlkwan]

Hi,

Does anyone have any background on FPGA? I'm new to all this stuff and I don't have any idea about it's hardware and software programming. Anyone can suggest a good resource or ebooks for it's hardware and software? I've seen it uses it's hardware from xilinx and for it's programming is altera?Please advise where can I start with. Can anyone also suggest some basic applications that can I do with fpga?

thanks and Regards.

 

[TrickyDicky]

Altera and Xilinx are two competitors and each produce their own line of FPGAs and design software.
As you're a beginner, I assume you're not familiar with HDLs (hardware description languages). There are two main languages, VHDL and Verilog. If you are familiar with C, you will probably prefer the syntax of Verilog. There are many tutorials around the web, I suggest just googling for one.

 

[kingearlkwan]

Hi,

thank you for your reply. At least I have now an Idea where should I start. Can you explain briefly what is FPGA? Sorry for this dumb question.

thanks and regards.

 

[TrickyDicky]

An FPGA is a field programmable gate array - basically a re-programmable digital logic circuit. Anything you could implement with digital logic, you could implement in here (like a CPU, data processor, ethernet controller etc.)

 

[kingearlkwan]

thanks for the brief explanation. So It's like a reprogrammable chip that you program in your fpga board that functions as digital logic circuit which depends on what circuitry you've made and how you program it.Am I correct?