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I'm in Comp Eng. at the University of Ottawa right now, and I'm having a hell of a time getting any hands on experience with FPGAs or board-level design. I work

I'm in Comp Eng. at the University of Ottawa right now, and I'm having a hell of a time getting any hands on experience with FPGAs or board-level design. I worked for one company on Co-op which was good enough to let me try to layout a simple board, but I'd simply never seen the best practices at work, and nobody really had the time to teach. I found VHDL really interesting, but I've only had about two classes worth, and I haven't really has a hobby project. I've though about picking up an Altera dev board and emulating an old computer architecture; is that the kind of practice you think would be worthwhile? Do you have any tips about learning board design and what kinds of projects/hardware are good to get started on?

jgw 14y ago
I'd heartily recommend to make the most of co-op opportunities if you can. I learned way more in co-op than I ever did in school. I suppose it's harder these days, as resources are stretched further so it's difficult for staff to allocate spare cycles for mentoring. It's unfortunately myopic, as we really need to invest more in guys like you for our future. Real board-level skills are difficult to acquire on your own. I've only done a little - and that was last millenium - but a lot of it is a black art: rules of thumb here and there about what works, what doesn't - and they're best learned as an apprentice to someone who's been doing it a while. VHDL is probably a cleaner language than Verilog/SystemVerilog, but it's used less in industry - at least in ASIC designs. There are free Verilog compilers/simulators (Icarus Verilog being a common one); there are probably no free SV implementations. Not sure what the status of free VHDL is. There are probably decent cheap options for development boards from Altera, Xilinx and co. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss further - email in profile.
pnathan 14y ago
If you want to check out VHDL in depth, you'll want to get this if you can: http://www.digilentinc.com/ http://www.digilentinc.com/ I've used them in digital design courses, they are pretty awesome. Xilinx, however, is eldritch.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  Having looked at this site, these boards seem very affordable and extensible. The Spartan-3, in particular, seems to offer everything I could want, and their development environment looks to support VHDL and Verilog. My only reservation is that the free tools they offer from their website are probably not very much like what's really used in industry, but it's a very cool start. Thanks!
umike 14y ago
For simple board design projects, I recommend starting with a microcontroller, such as AVR (as used by the Arduino). The chip manufacturer usually provides reference boards as a starting point / cheat-sheet for your design. If you'd like to go deep into embedded system design, I've also accumulated all of notes at: http://bringuplabs.com/guide/smartphone/ http://bringuplabs.com/guide/smartphone/ I'm actually looking for students to give feedback on this curriculum format, so feel free to message me if you have any questions!

jgw 14y ago

I'd heartily recommend to make the most of co-op opportunities if you can. I learned way more in co-op than I ever did in school. I suppose it's harder these days, as resources are stretched further so it's difficult for staff to allocate spare cycles for mentoring. It's unfortunately myopic, as we really need to invest more in guys like you for our future. Real board-level skills are difficult to acquire on your own. I've only done a little - and that was last millenium - but a lot of it is a black art: rules of thumb here and there about what works, what doesn't - and they're best learned as an apprentice to someone who's been doing it a while. VHDL is probably a cleaner language than Verilog/SystemVerilog, but it's used less in industry - at least in ASIC designs. There are free Verilog compilers/simulators (Icarus Verilog being a common one); there are probably no free SV implementations. Not sure what the status of free VHDL is. There are probably decent cheap options for development boards from Altera, Xilinx and co. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss further - email in profile.

pnathan 14y ago

If you want to check out VHDL in depth, you'll want to get this if you can: http://www.digilentinc.com/ http://www.digilentinc.com/ I've used them in digital design courses, they are pretty awesome. Xilinx, however, is eldritch.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
Having looked at this site, these boards seem very affordable and extensible. The Spartan-3, in particular, seems to offer everything I could want, and their development environment looks to support VHDL and Verilog. My only reservation is that the free tools they offer from their website are probably not very much like what's really used in industry, but it's a very cool start. Thanks!

umike 14y ago

For simple board design projects, I recommend starting with a microcontroller, such as AVR (as used by the Arduino). The chip manufacturer usually provides reference boards as a starting point / cheat-sheet for your design. If you'd like to go deep into embedded system design, I've also accumulated all of notes at: http://bringuplabs.com/guide/smartphone/ http://bringuplabs.com/guide/smartphone/ I'm actually looking for students to give feedback on this curriculum format, so feel free to message me if you have any questions!