KLH10, The more I read about FPGAs the more I think I should really get into this area. I have no significant electronics expertise (at the resistor, capacitor and transistor level), but I did study digital logic at University so I can design combinatorial logic, I understand the basics of timing etc. What would be the best way to get into this without spending a lot of money? Anyone have any good book suggestions? Basic equipment needed, FPGAs to use etc? Thanks Rob

On 8/30/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I'm in the same boat - I have an older Spartan FPGA on an IOB6120, but I've done little with it other than stare at the source with vague comprehension. Before the Cray-1 replica post, I was already looking at the Diligent boards because of the project that does arcade machine emulation on them (the example I saw was with one of the line of Diligent Spartan 3E boards, running Asteroids or Pac-Man, etc). Excellent. For me, Linux development support is 100% essential. I'm not likely to bother to get started if I have to set up a new environment just to play with toys (I'm already set for Arduino and Makerbot hacking from my CentOS laptop). Can you be a little more specific? What counts as "the very largest"? I am, in fact, a bit muddled about which Diligent board would be a good buy. I see prices between $100 and $200 for boards with various features, but besides just buying the most expensive board because "of course" it will have the most extras (attached RAM amount, gate count, etc), I'm not sure what to get to be able to take advantage of what appears to be an active pool of Diligent-based projects (I've encountered two just in the past 10 days). I've seen gate counts like 100K, 250K, 500K, and I've seen model numbers like the "Spartan 3E-1600" and am not quite sure what maps to what. Could someone who owns a Diligent board provide any information about variations from model to model and what features are "must haves"? Thanks, -ethan

On 8/30/10 3:12 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: I don't know where the cutoff point is, but it's big. If you want to design with a monstrosity of an FPGA that has over a thousand pins, one or more integrated (not array-implemented) PowerPC CPUs and GigE controllers, and carries a single-unit price tag in the hundreds of dollars as "used pull, needs reballing, as-is" on eBay, then the free WebPACK probably won't do it. ;) I have an S3BOARD with the XC3S1000 (1,000,000-gate) chip upgrade. The board is very "friendly" and has flexible I/O that's easy to deal with, and they have a line of "expansion" boards that plug onto its connectors, that give you things like solder-type and solderless breadboard areas, some analog I/O, etc etc. I think it's the best bang for the buck. It has plenty of onboard goodies (RAM, PS/2 kbd, VGA, etc), without being "too much" to get in the way of actually using the FPGA's pins for your own stuff. This is it: http://digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=S3BOARD It comes with extensive documentation including schematics, and lots of other stuff like "here's how you generate a VGA signal" and "here's how you interface to a PS/2 keyboard, and here are all the PS/2 key press/release codes". The current price is $109, plus $50 for the million-gate chip upgrade. I have the board manual handy in PDF format; let me know if you'd like a copy to study. I'd been out of the FPGA world for a couple of years, but got back into it early this year. The new Linux-based WebPACK software is nice, but I was annoyed to discover that my very expensive USB JTAG module was been desupported while I was away. Fortunately, new ones are nowhere near as expensive as they used to be. As far as "must haves", well, that depends on what you want to do. ;) Personally I like PS/2 keyboard interfaces and VGA connectors with attached DAC networks. Attached SRAM is handy. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

In article <AANLkTikgyX8T4-H0OP-5P2KjkPe+M25OTCEcgQO2Z4kg at mail.gmail.com>, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes: I believe the 3E is for embedded designs, i.e. automotive applications, etc. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

In article <4C7DEE9F.5020807 at brouhaha.com>, Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> writes: Well, when I try to find out information on Spartan 3 FPGA's on Xilinx's web site, all the web sections have "Automotive" plastered all over them. Perhaps they are just trying to market to that segment. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

geoffrey oltmans wrote: applications I can't tell you much about Altera, but some of the dedicated hardware in Xilinx FPGAs have included: * block RAMs, 18 or 36 Kbit, in almost all parts * multipliers or multiply/accumulate blocks in many parts * very high speed (>1Gbps) serial transceivers in some parts * a small amount of logic for traditional PCI, in the Spartan-2 * hardware PCIe endpoint logic in the Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 * hardware DDR SDRAM controller in the Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 * PowerPC processor core in some Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 parts * 10/100/1000 Ethernet MAC in some Virtex-5 and Virtex-6 parts For details, such as which parts have how many of what hardware blocks, you'll have to check the datasheets. Generally they only put in hardware blocks for things that can't be implemented reasonably efficiently in the fabric. I consider the 10/100/1000 Ethernet MAC to be an exception to that rule of thumb. Certainly if you want the kinds of traditional peripherals found in early microcomputers (GPIO, timers, UARTs, video display controllers), those will have to be in the fabric. Eric

Chuck Guzis wrote: Certainly the Spartan-6 chips are far more cost effective than Spartan-3. For eval boards, I'm not convinced that this is the case yet. There aren't nearly as many inexpensive development boards for the -6 yet. I haven't yet seen any inexpensive Spartan-6 boards that seem comparable to the Digilent Spartan-3E or Spartan-3A boards, in terms of FPGA capacity, on-board peripheral interfaces/connectors, and availability of GPIO pins on connectors. Eric

In article <4C7F13F0.8050004 at brouhaha.com>, Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> writes: That seems to echo what I was seeing in a casual search for eval/proto boards. The Spartan-6 ones were like $1K but the Spartan-3 ones were like $300. It wasn't a exhaustive search, just a few minutes spent searching. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

Richard wrote: The Spartan-3 (no alpha suffix) is now an "older" family (as compared to the -3E, -3A, and -6), so yes, they might only be "pushing" the automotive spec parts, but they are still in full production in the standard commercial and industrial grades. Basically to get information for older devices out of the Xilinx web site requires clicking on "all devices" or some such thing. In fact, even the older Spartan-XL and Spartan-2 families are in full production, though they are not recommended for new designs, and you have to use older ("archived") versions of the ISE software to develop for them. (For Spartan-XL, there is no version of ISE that included HDL synthesis, so I definitely recommend against trying to use those for hobbyist development with Verilog or VHDL.) Beyond that, even some of the XC3000 and XC4000 parts are still in production. AFAIK, the only FPGA families that Xilinx have completely discontinued are the original XC2000 series (introduced in 1985), XC5200 series, and XC6200 series. Generally speaking, it only makes sense to use the most recent two generations of FPGAs for new designs, as the newer parts are always more cost-effective than the older ones, thanks largely to Moore's Law. Usually the only reason not to use the very latest (currently Spartan-6) is that the availability is not as good as the previous generation (Spartan-3E, -3A). Eric

Ethan Dicks wrote: I used the same board (Digilent Spartan 3 1600E) for several projects, including the COSMAC Elf I recently did for RetroChallenge 2010. It's a great board. Me too. Xilinx supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux with their no-charge WebPack software. (Older releases only supported 32-bit, though you could kludge the install script to make it install the 32-bit version on a 64-bit host.) They officially only support RHEL, but it also works on Centos, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. With some releases I've had to do a bit of fiddling to get them working on Fedora, but Xilinx 12.1i worked perfectly on Fedora 12 with no special effort required. The free stuff supports all Spartan-3E, -3A, and -3AN FPGAs, Spartan-3 parts up to the 3S1500, and Spartan-3A DSP parts up to the 1800. There are size limits on all the others (notably the Virtex families). If you need the details, there's a comparison chart showing the difference between the no-charge WebPack and the various paid editions of the software: http://www.xilinx.com/publications/matrix/Software_matrix.pdf Eric

--- On Mon, 8/30/10, Keith <keithvz at verizon.net> wrote: Keith, have you had any issues when transferring projects between the two environments ? I'm about to start working on a project that was originally developed using the Windows version of ISE, but will be maintained using the Linux version of ISE under SuSE 11. -Dave

On 30/08/10 18:25, Dave McGuire wrote: If you're taking the Xilinx route and want a cheap entry, the Enterpoint Drigmorn2 is also worth a look: http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/drigmorn/drigmorn2.html It's based around a Spartan3A-700 FPGA, and has: 256MBit x32 SDRAM, 128Mbit SPI Flash, a text-based 16x2 LCD display (HD44780 controller), a bunch of 'traffic light' LEDs (four full R/Y/G sets and a standalone red) one 16-position hexadecimal switch and two pushbuttons FTDI USB Serial Port controller chip (FT232) 25MHz onboard oscillator Two 20-pin 5V-tolerant GPIO ports (40 pins total) with LVDS support Price is about ?110 for board and parallel programming cable, ?170 for board and USB programming cable, or (if memory serves) about ?100 for board only. If you want to go down the Altera route, the Altera Cyclone II Starter Board is available from DigiKey and Farnell (last I checked, DigiKey were significantly cheaper). That's based on a Cyclone II 2C20 FPGA, and the following peripherals: 8Mbit PowerChip SDRAM (though I understand this has been swapped with a different part in more recent builds), 512Kbit x16 SDRAM, 4Mbit parallel FLASH, SMA external clock input (plus 24, 27 and 50MHz TTL oscillators), Wolfson Microelectronics WM8731 24-bit audio codec, Ten switches (latching on/off), Four pushbuttons, 14 LEDs (10 red, 4 green), Four-digit segment-addressable 7seg display, VGA, RS232, PS/2 (keyboard-mode only, the Minimig DE1 Port project has documented a simple modification which adds mouse-mode), Two 40-pin IDC connectors with (if memory serves) 32 GPIOs each Built-in Altera USB Blaster cable clone Cost is about ?120 total for the Cyclone II Starter Board. It's also sold as the TerASIC DE1, so look out for those too (same board, but without the silver Altera sticker). The Minimig Amiga clone has been ported to the DE1 (minimig-tg68), and that's quite cool to play with for a while on a rainy day. Disadvantages are you can't really do LVDS on the DE1 (so you can't hook up a laptop LCD panel without an external LVDS transceiver chip); the Drigmorn2 has a couple of switchable LVDS/GPIO pairs on the main connector. This is a bit specialist though; I like the pluggable modules on the Drigmorn2, but I like that the Altera board has >90% of what I need on it already (no need to make up expander boards most of the time). The Drigmorn2 does have Ethernet, PS/2 and USB boards available, which are kinda cool to play with. If you're just starting, go with a Digilent kit board or the Altera DE1. I find the Altera Quartus software easier to use (and a lot less finicky) than the Xilinx Webpack, but that's just me. Altera also tend to be much more receptive to bug reports -- Xilinx are well known for making it almost impossible to file a bug report or contact an FAE... Xilinx parts also tend to be harder to find than Altera parts, so bear that in mind if you're doing a production design. I found it much easier to get hold of Altera Cyclone2 parts than Xilinx Spartans... Farnell stock small quantities of CYC2s, and if I need more there's always DigiKey. Put simply: you're likely to have less headaches starting with Altera. If you want to play with 'soft-core' CPUs, get one of the Cyclone III Starter Kit boards, they have more flash and RAM, but it's a DDR SDRAM which makes designing a memory controller harder (but there are a few OSS/FS ones on OpenCores). If you just want a simple entry-level board, look at the Cyclone II Starter Kit. -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

On 8/30/10 10:03 PM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: I got started by following some examples, simple stuff like a binary counter followed by a 7-segment decoder driving an LED. I did a little with VHDL, then quickly developed a preference for Verilog (less of the "designed by committee" feel) but all of the commercial stuff I've done with this, using CPLDs, was very small and I did it with schematics. I just found that my brain works better that way. I'll see if I can find the examples I started with. They won't apply to the current WebPACK user interface because this was around 2001 or so, but they may be helpful anyway. -Dave PS - I have a box of stuff ready to go out to you, you'll hear from me about that soon! -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 8/30/10 11:15 PM, Keith wrote: There's some great stuff there. I wish it was around (or that I had found it if it was) when I started. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

I'll try again this week, I'm VERY interested in CPLD things for speeding-up development and reconfiguration Ebaaaa!!! :oD I'm crazy to put my hands on the contents of this box :D :D :D Thanks Alexandre

For me, the FPGA brand would not be a problem,"Can I solder it to the PCB board for the Computer Replica I want?", is my problem Also remember to buy your switches when you can find them, blinky lights are cheap if you have the I/O lines. FPGA's take a bit of time to configure from ROM so a clean booting system may take a bit of thought. That is all I have to say, I am using CPLD's since I plan to build a classic 18 bit computer: AC, MAR, PC & MBR. So far 2 - 128 macro cell CPLD's will work for the Control & Alu sections. 1 - 64 macro cell cpld will handle I/O. The CPU has ADD,SUB,BIT(~ac&(mem)),DCA as the main data reference. Indirect ADD,SUB,BIT,DCA as well as BTB (bit byte indirect) DCB ( DCA byte indirect). Operate NOP,HLT,DI,EI,CLA,SZL,RCR,RCL. Control logic JZ,JLT,JGE,JSV(pc=(mem);ac=pc). Interupt after CLA,DCA. (ac=pc+2,jmp 0). 16KW direct address space,128 KB address space direct. 2.0 us memory cycle time. OP 2 us, mem/jmp 4 us,mem indirect 6 us. Ben.

On 30 Aug 2010 at 12:27, Tom Uban wrote: Nope. See earlier discussion on Erik's VCF: http://bit.ly/bIgyj2 I passed on a couple of names of friends who worked on the early Cray software, but I don't know if he ever followed up on them--or if they had anything (COS or UNICOS). --Chuck