Lpc2000

--- In lpc2000@yahoogroups.com, "bell_c_d" <bell_c_d@y...> wrote:
>
> With no experience in CPLD/FPGA design, this discussion (and the 
> opencores website) has piqued my curiousity.  Could someone here 
> recommend a good way to get started?  Perhaps recommend some basic 
> books on concepts design (that also discuss interfacing to mcus).

In both cases, you are dealing with hardware at the very lowest 
level.  Gates, registers, clocks, state machines, etc.  Personally, 
I haven't seen anything at an entry level and certainly nothing 
about interfacing with MCUs although that isn't difficult, in 
concept.  I have found "Essential VHDL" (Sundar Rajan) to be quite 
good and, from time to time, I find help in "HDL Chip Design" by 
Douglas Smith.

There is demo code included with the Spartan 3 Starter Board 
(www.digilentinc.com) and there is a lot of stuff at 
www.opencores.org.  Personally, I started with VHDL and haven't made 
the switch to Verilog.  You need to know both languages.  I'll get 
there one of these days.

As with everything else, "Hello World!" or a blinking LED is the 
first step.  Then you move up from there.

There is something to be said for starting with a CPLD.  It is a 
much simpler device but it is also more limited.  Nevertheless, 
there is a place in the world for logic gates on steroids.  Not a 
unique project but why not implement an I2C scope trigger?  Just 
decode the start condition and send a trigger pulse to a scope.  
This would make it easier to see short (2 or 3 byte) messages 
without a logic analyzer.

Wander around at Digilent, they have a lot of cool stuff.

Richard