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I haven't had experience with PCI but yes with FPGA, even though at a hobby level. Learning digital design was extremely rewarding for me and I absolutely reco
by _benj 7y ago
I haven't had experience with PCI but yes with FPGA, even though at a hobby level.
Learning digital design was extremely rewarding for me and I absolutely recommend it.
The main reason for FPGA is that you use A LOT of parallel communication so even though the clock speed of the FPGA might be 200MHz, multiply that for 16, 32 or more lines and you get GBit speeds.
You can get affordable FPGA boards for learning with Lattice iCE40 family. When you jump into Altera or Xilinx things change a little, but you can still get a VERY decent development board from Terasic for a little over $100.
For learning I personally recommend the book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture" by Harris & Harris
Even if you don't become a full FPGA pro, knowing your computer down to a logic gate level brings huge advantages to how you see it, interact with it and write software for it!
- yummypaint 7y agoUpvote for the iCE40. Last i heard it's one of the only devices to have a fully open source toolchain. I had a good experience learning on altera, and they had a pretty comprehensive dev environment, but my impression is that every aspect of their "university program" is ultimately geared towards extracting money from people in exchange for use of ip cores regardless of whether it's really appropriate for the users needs. That being said, i can vouch for cheap terasic boards. I might reccommend buying a sub $50 altera board to get over the initial learning curve, and then expanding into less commercially oriented stuff for more complex projects. Edit: the iCE40 is a popular choice at CERN, and you should be able to find materials geared towards young physics grad students and other fpga non-experts.