Re: [avr-gcc-list] [OT] Need For Speed (FPGA)

[Russell Shaw]

Marvin Dickens wrote:
> On Friday 27 May 2005 07:22 pm, Martin Bammer wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I can recommend SpartanII and Spartan3. These chips are quite cheap and
> > powerful. A development system under Linux is available since a few months.
> > It's free. I recommend to set kate as an external editor, because it's so
> > much better to work with. At the moment I prefer SpartanII because they
> > only need 2 different supply voltages. Spartan3 needs 3, which leads to a
> > much more complex design. Because you are a beginner you should buy a
> > starter kit. If you plan to create complex designs you REALLY should learn
> > VHDL. VHDL programming is possible (and very comfortable) with the IDE from
> > Xilinx.
>
> I second Martins suggestion to learn VHDL. Regarding who's silicon to 
> purchase, I mostly work with Altera. But, that's not to say Xilinx does not 
> have good products - They do. FWIW, I seem to recall that a couple of AVR 
> processors have been implimented in fpga's. I believe that I saw the projects 
> at opencores.org. If my memory serves me correctly, at least one of them
> claimed to have a 3X increase in speed as compared to the atmel offerings.
> Even if this is not exactly accurate, I'd still bet you could massage out a 
> lot of I/O pins using this route.
>
> Hmm. This makes me want to load a chip and see how well it
> plays with gcc. That would be a hoot :)

Having learnt and used vhdl on xilinx spartanII in depth using webpack, and used
vhdl on altera acex, i found vhdl an overly verbose, inflexible, poorly designed
and cumbersome language. It is a pascal/ada like language. They say verilog
is a C-like language. I'd rather learn that next time than touch vhdl with
a barge pole. Also useful to read news:comp.arch.fpga