| ??? 11/10/06 22:54 Read: times |
#127750 - FPGA boards and that Cypress book Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Russ Cooper said:
For the record, this is strictly a learning exercise for me. I don't have any real projects in mind, nor any motivation to actually wire up a bunch of stuff on a prototype board. Given that, it seems to me like it would be handy to get an evaluation board like the one suggested by Mike that does have some switches and LEDs and whatnot already on it, even though they would certainly be in the way for somebody trying to add more hardware of their own. I also liked the price. I was thinking the cost of entry might be much higher. The point of these little development boards is to learn FPGA basics. To that end, simple things like an LED display or LCD panel, a serial port, some memory and some buttons are reasonable peripherals. Of course if you have specific project requirements you'll do your own PCB with the hardware you need. That's always going to be the case. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is the Cypress book. Can somebody give the title of this fine tome? I'll be the contrarian here and say: that book is awful. It's out of date, and was out of date when I first looked at it in the mid 90s. Its age is the problem, as it only knows about VHDL-87 and tools today support the features and syntax of VHDL-2002. Also, I recall that the Cypress VHDL tools sucked. Want a good book? Ashenden's is the standard but its emphasis is not limited to the synthesizable stuff used by FPGA tools. That book, and Xilinx' XST docs, are a decent way to get started. -a |
