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My Xula-2 board just arrived and I hope it does not meet the same fate as yours. I also have a papilo board that is gathering dust and a DE0 nano somewhere (at least I had a little more success with that - the Altera toolchain seemed more tractible but equally huge).

I have had a hard time getting started. I have no doubt that an open source toolchain will be a great step forward in lowering that barrier and I'll probably have a play with that in good time, I especially liked the idea of playing with the j1a forth CPU.

In the mean time I'll be using the overwhelming xilinx toolchain. I chose the xula board because the Xess website seems to have some good "get you started" documentation, the image download tools are python based, the xilinx LX25 has some great clock/PLL resources that I wanted to use and I did not want to run into problems fitting my design into the ICE40.

It's mostly excuses though, I really should have had better results with the boards I have after all this time...

If you're going that way, don't discount the XuLA-200.

It will enable you to write real code for an FPGA using a subset of normal F# with some parallel programming semantics. You can download it here. That is, you can write normal F# code and calculate some result as a regular F# program on your pc, then compile the code for the FPGA and see the same output on an FPGA. It's ideal for a software programmer like yourself who wants to get started with serious FPGA programming. There are many good books on verilog and VHDL. For VHDL one of the best is Peter Ashenden's "The Designer's Guide to VHDL". For verilog a good book is Vranesic and Brown's "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design" (they also have a similar book for VHDL).

Xess has a good Xilinx-based started board and great tutorials. As other's have mentioned, Digilent also has some good starter boards. The company was started by a couple of professors from Washington State University. A course that one of them teaches (Clint Cole) has some excellent tutorials on FPGAs. Make sure you get a board with a VGA interface and check out some of the classic arcade game projects implemented on an FPGA (eg, fpgaarcade.com). Enjoy!

You can get an evalkit from anyone of top FPGA vendors for a $hundred or two (for example), program it in VHDL (if you were doing software for a while it will be quite easy for you, just another language -- actually if you've ever done Ada it will be very easy, it is basically the same), compile VHDL program, load it into the board (they come with USB, parallel or plain old serial links) -- and here is your first special-purpoise hardware device! ;-)

Now, the problem is to figure out what do you want it to do.... ;-)

Paul B.

I am lazy and don't want to look this all up myself if someone else already knows, so here is a question: Left over from my undergrad project, I have a FPGA (XC4010XL from Xilinx) plus prototype board (XS40 from XESS), and have used the Xilinx foundation tools to code up some nice VHDL designs under NT. How can I do similar design work under Linux? Will gEDA suffice? Or, will I need a slew of other tools? Any VHDL environments? Or maybe Verilog? Something else? Are any of you super-smart /.-ers doing this purely under linux?

Depends on how DIY you really want to get... i bet this little number from xess would work nicely if your in for some heavy designing. (i am kinda working on a small wareable stack-engine based system to build out of the same board)

Oninoshiko

$20! Where do you get your prices? True, an FPGA chip by itself costs around $20 from someplace like DigiKey. Yet, an FPGA is completely useless by itself. As a hobbyist, he'll need some sort of PCB to plug in the FPGA, power it (they lose their bitstream once power is removed), and a cable to program it. More like $150 from my experience.

I'm not too familiar with Altera, but www.xess.com makes terrific Xilinx-based dev boards starting at $150. They have an on-board i2c-usb chip, 8 MB DRAM, VGA, and tons of free reference designs. It's almost too easy... ya do like Verilog, don't ya?

~ SleezyG

If you want a good "Getting started with Hardware Design" I suggest attending a university for a Computer or Electrical Engineering degree. .....Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.


Get off your high horse, dude. It is NOT that hard to get started. With a good introductory book and a CPLD/FPGA demo board something like this, it is quite possible for someone who has never done logic design to get up to speed and crank out a few simple working designs after a couple weeks of study.

I don't think the parent post was suggesting that learning how to make a high-speed, silicon-ready design is as easy as learning a new programming language, but there is a lot you can learn and do with VHDL on the way there.

Perhaps Andre doesn't quite understand how logic synthesis differs from procedural coding. He hasn't even prototyped the FPGA version as far as one can see on the site, and his XGS schematics are unreadable.

If your fantasies run in this direction (as mine do) you'd be much better off buying a Xilinx/XESS prototyping board. They're available now, they work great with free toolchains, and they're a lot less expensive than anything Andre will bring to market in the next two to three years. Plus you can read their schematics and design your own (as I've done) if you don't have $149 handy.

Only if you buy the wrong ones....

A nice list of FPGA dev boards and their prices

A nice cheap (and well loaded) dev board ($149)

I've got one of these, they are real nice for $99

These guys have lots of good stuff too. Inexpensive, and nice. I own a bunch of stuff I bought from them.

I don't post much so my Karma is fairly hard won but I'm going to troll anyway.

There is so much stupid shit being said in response to this article that I have to offer some advice to those without a clue:

1) For God's sake go learn a language (like C/C++ or assembly) where you can do some real damage. I'm conviced nobody truely "gets" software until they've spent three sleepless nights in a row tracking down a fandango on core.

2) Really grok a language that changes your way of thinking -- Haskell is a pretty good bet.

3) Dig up old hardware take it apart, put it back together. Get it to work again.

4) Use a hardware assisted debugger or in circuit emulator.

5) Go build and a small 8051 embedded system project just for fun but make sure you include an LCD display in the project -- and not just one of the easy serial type.

6) Buy a cheap scope -- Before you go insane from step 5.

7) Learn what happens under to the covers.

8) Say "Fuck the Wizard and the IDE you rode in on too."

9) Learn VHDL and digital design just for the heck of it These folks have everything you need.

If you've done this, you've learned a lot. But after all that, think about the things you still don't know. Marvell at your stupidity -- admit it openly. Be humbled. You will be a better person for it.

In short, don't become just another button pushing pinhead. You don't have to live that way.

Oh, and if you're one of the few that have taken the time and effort to become aware of how much you don't know, thank you. You are a credit to the profession.

In this case, I would hope that XESS makes a PCI version of their nice little FPGA boards in which to put this GNU hardware.

Bugger! Lets try again.

What they need is an XESS board

I used one when I made my MIPS clone and it was huge. I could fit an array of 14 full 32 bit processors on one Vertex chip all working at 100MHz. The cool thing is that they also have a VGA port and a DAC.

What they need is an

I used one when I made my MIPS clone and it was huge. I culd fit an array of 14 full 32 bit processors on one Vertex chip all working at 100MHz. The cool thing is that they also have a VGA port and a DAC.

Oh please. I build stuff all the time at home and in the lab, last time I checked, places like Maxim have -free- sample quantities in packages you can work with if you have a good iron (SOIC, et al). Getting boards done in small volume is cheap, use a tool like Eagle, which is even available for Linux (but not OS X, doh!). Spend a few bucks and get a quality board done at a internet based low volume PCB shop.

There are evil packages, but the truth is a lot of the prototyping and test work is done on hand placed boards. Even evil packages can be used if you get an adapter board, there are a few of them out there.

What's more telling is that now instead of messing with token things, and "wow, I actually got something to show up on the display", you can do some real work with your computer and designs and instruments. I realized awhile ago I was spending far too much of my time tinkering with things and not enough accomplishing things.. but I guess some of that is the Linux mentality too. :) Now I figure out what I want to accomplish and use the best tool, rather than attempting to make everything into a nail for my hammer.

For $300 or so you can even get prototype boards for FPGAs if you want to do custom hardware. $150 will get you a decent micro development system, and AVRGCC is gnu, runs on linux and windows (but not OS X :), and lets you program cheap cheap cheap AVRs to do just about anything you want. Mix with ADCs and some transistor fed relays or PWM control to do whatever. You can get software to turn your PC into a function generator to test, or if you hunt around, you can get a nice old digital oscilloscope AND a real function generator AND a bus analyser suitable for 8 bit micros (or more) for less than the cost of a PC 4 years ago.

Same thing applies for most other scientific equipment. Be careful when sourcing chemistry gear, even broken stuff, or you might have the DEA paying you a little visit if you happen to live in the USA. If high voltage fun is your bag, there's companies for that. There are even companies that sell cold fusion experiment kits - although most of the magic there seems to be in the process used to create the electrodes.

I contend there's never been a better time to BE a amateur scientist! You can actually afford to have a decent lab since last year's gear can be tracked down on the cheap.. and accomplish real work, too! How many high res night shots could you store on a $200 80gb drive? Etc, etc, etc, etc.

Death of amateur science predicted! Film at 11.

Well, you can (potentially) build your own custom processor, actually. has all you need to get into the wonderful world of FPGAs. Better to start by modifying the pre-fab processors at OpenCores, though, as designing a processor from scratch is insanely difficult.

Unfortunately, it would be cheaper to just buy a Pentium or Z80 or whatever and go from there.