6 Jan
2010
6 Jan
'10
7:57 p.m.
* On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 12:54:57PM -0600, Brian Lanning <brianlanning at
gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Keith Monahan
<keithvz at verizon.net> wrote:
I like that phrase :-)
This was really the biggest challenge to me when I started playing with
FPGAs via an inexpensive Digilent board. Before 2007, I had never really
touched hardware. I knew what a resistor was, that was about it. But I've
been programming since I first laid hands on a Commodore 64, so those
concepts were deeply ingrained. It took a little while - and a bunch of
synthesis errors - before I really understood that VHDL and Verilog are not
programming languages. They're hardware description languages. I had to get
that software developer brain damage out of my head and start anew!
The good news is that the FPGA was a gateway drug. When I had my epiphany
about hardware description langauges, I realized I'd better understand a
little something about hardware, and that led to my buying a breadboard and
some components. Now I have a fully stocked electronics workbench that's
led to a lot of fun tinkering, and a much richer understanding of the
computers that I've been collecting all these years.
but I think the word "emulate" is
really walking a thin line when we talk
about this stuff. ?The minimig, for instance, is really an Amiga clone. ?It
doesn't "emulate" a processor -- it either has a physical hardware
processor
or a processor core in the FPGA. ?The hardware actually exists physically.
?The custom chips logic is physically instantiated and temporarily created
within the FPGA.
I have software developer brain damage. :-) brian
-Seth