From a _hobbyist_ perspective, I am not sure
you're missing much.
I've designed with FPGas as part of a job, and didn't enjoy it much.
Try them again, as I suspect you experience is with very old FPGA
families . They have come a long way.
I do get moderately annoyed with people who tell me what I should and
should not enjoy :-). If you are paying me to design soemthing, then I'll
use very difrenet desing criteria and devices to what I'll do if I am
doing it for myself. In the latter case maximising my pleasure comes a
long way up the list.
I do not enjoy (really) doing anything much at a computer screen. I
don';t like programing, I don't like entering VHDL, I don't like
scheamtic capture. I am happiest using a pen and paper and a soldering
iron. As I said, it's for myself, I do it becuase I enjoy it, so I use
the methods I enjoy.
In what way have the deives improved?
For a one-off design, where size is no real
issue, I much prefer to
grab a handful of TTL pacakges and start soldering.
That will severely and unnecessessary limit both design size and speed.
I totally disagree with the first (having built things with a few hundred
pacakges (at least). And as for the second, OK, I'll grab some ECL (I#'ve
hand-wired ECL circuits that go at sevearl hundred MHz with no problems).
Quite apart from the fact that as I said at the start 'for me as a
hobbyist'. I may not want ot make large or high-speed designs (and what
appears to require high speed logic may not if you actually think about
the problem).
-tony
