On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 11:05:35AM -0800, Al Kossow wrote:
[...]
I had been tinkering with Cyclone parts, but most
people here use Xilinx. I
think Verilog vs VHDL is about half and half. Over Christmas, I bought myself
a Pipistrello board with level converter shield
http://pipistrello.saanlima.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_Pipistrello
My research into FPGAs so far has come up with the following:
I am informed that Xilinx's FPGAs are better than Altera's, but Altera's
development tools are much better. Having actually *used* Altera's Quartus II
and found it to be pretty hateful, I dread to think how horrible Xilinx's tools
must be.
Verilog claims to be C-like, but this isn't particularly true. Some of its
expression syntax is C-inspired, but you could describe it as Perl-like or
Java-like at that point! It's somewhat more Perl-like in that you can just glue
fragments together and it'll generally work. Even a rank amateur like myself
managed to get a blinking LED after barely twenty hours or so of effort :)
VHDL appears to be much more strongly-typed, which I approve of as it means
code that actually compiles is much more likely to be correct, however a
beginner is going to find themselves utterly flummoxed because they're having
to learn circuit design and a rather picky language. I decided to leave
learning VHDL for the day when I embark upon a more ambitious project that
would benefit from a more rigorous design.