[HN Gopher] CPLDs, and the importance of knowing when to quit. (...
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       CPLDs, and the importance of knowing when to quit. (2012)
        
       Author : parsecs
       Score  : 6 points
       Date   : 2021-03-14 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bytecruft.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bytecruft.com)
        
       | bcrl wrote:
       | http://www.fpga4fun.com/ is a great starting place. FPGA tool
       | chains have a pretty brutal learning curve, but if you have the
       | hardware mindset and can deal with waveforms, they're not that
       | hard. The worst part of the learning curve I found was the subtle
       | issues that are different between simulation and synthesis, along
       | with outright bugs in some of the simulation libraries (Xilinx,
       | I'm looking at you - your simulated FIFOs are buggy!). Sticking
       | to particular coding styles can avoid this (avoid asynchronous
       | resets like the plague), but there is not as much material
       | available on this topic for Verilog and VHDL as with software
       | programming languages. Getting data into and out of a chip is
       | where a lot of these problems crop up. Xilinx's SERDES blocks are
       | absolutely insane to get working the first time one tries. The
       | Microsemi Polarfire was ridiculously easy compared to that.
       | Gigabit ethernet and GMII have weird timing issues that you have
       | to be aware of (ODELAY on the Spartan 6 is needed to satisfy the
       | Marvell PHYs, while other boards with a National Semiconductor
       | PHY don't care about that 1ns).
       | 
       | Maybe it's a bit harder than I admit now that I think about all
       | the battle scars from fooling around with FGPAs over the last 12
       | years...
        
       | ampdepolymerase wrote:
       | Most people don't realize how revolutionary Arduino and Raspberry
       | Pi were in bridging the gap from BASIC PICs to modern day
       | microcontrollers and low cost single board computers. Their
       | efforts forced manufacturers across the world to design for both
       | layman and professionals, without which we would all still be
       | using IDEs costing several hundred dollars. Even FPGAs now are
       | slowly embracing open source and user friendly UIs.
        
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