I finished my VHDL course and I'm filling the gaps in the course on my own now.
1. I just downloaded the evaluation version of modelsim to practice some test benches on it. Is this version as good as the full version? do you know of any limitations?
2. I was reading about picoblaze microcontroller core from xilinx. It is very bad microcontroller compared to real 8052, dspic etc in terms of programming instructions. My question is isn't it better to use external microcontroller and program it with decent instruction sets or C language and interface it to normal FPGA or CPLD to get the best of both worlds. I know if you do it inside the fpga you save on pcb space and achieve higher operating speed due to short busses inside the fpga but is the hassle of programming the core with lousy instruction set worth it?
3. I'm going to build my first CPLD board next monday to control HD44780 LCD. Hope the XC9572XL I have will have enuf resources to do the job otherwise I have to think about another project. Will try to have a go at Richards project excercise and if it worked I will rip a hard disk open and try to get the data out with an FPGA, then maybe start a business of recovering data on broken hard drives.
Mahmood