[Coco] OT: FPGA Guys out there

[John Kent]

The book I started out with was VHDL 3rd edition by Douglas Perry, but I 
can't honestly say that I found it very useful.
Most of my understanding was gleaned by looking at other examples and 
trying to figure out what logic was being implemented. Xilinx and Altera 
have a lot of their reference material online. Altera Quartus software 
used to have a tutorial link on the start up page of their software.

Tony Burch of Burch Electronic Designs (BurchED.com) used to sell 
training videos for a reasonable price, but last time I checked his web 
site it was blank, so he might have moved on to other things. If you 
google for VHDL or Verilog Tutorial you are bound to find plenty of 
reference web sites. My FPGA page has a few references, but I haven't 
updated it in a while:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/jekent/FPGA.htm

You may find some University web pages with useful FPGA information on 
them as well. I think there is a useful VHDL reference site at some of 
the German Universities (University of Hamburg ? - something like that)

I tried to to implement a 6809 design straight off from some code, but 
it was too complicated to figure out and didn't work anyway, so I went 
back to basics and modified a simple 4 instruction micro processor by 
Tim Boeske (sp?) that fitted on one A4 page. The Douglas Perry book gave 
some clues as to how to design a CPU, but the example was incomplete.

John.

On 5/03/2013 5:18 AM, Louis Ciotti wrote:
> OK so I have dipped my toe a couple of times into the FPGA water, even have
> a Spartan 3E board, but now I really want to get into using these devices.
>   Short of spending $$ on a course can someone recommend some reading
> material to get a true beginner of using FPGAs up to speed and
> programming/making useful things with them?  Up until know I have been
> butchering other code snippets, and not truly getting how to do things from
> my own code from scratch.
>
> --
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>
>

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