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So I have a question. FPGA development really interests me, but I really don’t know where to get started. I’ve done a bit of embedded systems work, mostly wit
by skipkey 4y ago
So I have a question. FPGA development really interests me, but I really don’t know where to get started. I’ve done a bit of embedded systems work, mostly with WinCE 5 a decade or so back and some work on video slot machines, but nothing at this level. What would be a good place to start? Most of the things I have looked at seem to assume a slightly higher level of knowledge than I currently have.
- CamperBob2 4y agoIt's almost always best to start with an application. What do you want to do that involves moving a lot of data around while performing some hard realtime processing on it? The answer will tell you if FPGAs are a good fit for the job. Assuming they are, the answer will also give you an initial handhold on the mountain of training and R&D work that you'll need to deal with to make it happen.
- mng2 4y agoThe first thing to note is that while HDL coding may look like programming, it is not (mostly). HDLs are for describing hardware, and it takes some time for this to sink in. There are two sides to the coin: understanding digital design in the abstract, and understanding HDL design patterns to define the desired logic circuits. If you don't have any digital design experience, an oft-recommended course is nand2tetris. I should say though, that that is the bottom-up approach. It is possible these days to string together a bunch of IPs and not write any HDL, depending on what you want to do. But you will probably be stuck if anything at all goes awry, so I don't recommend the top-down approach.
- harvie 4y agoThis is crazy helpful for beginners: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio They have drag and drop FPGA programming using visual gates and cores with very well documented examples.