[SunRescue] I could run a small country...

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 25 Dec 2000, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On December 24, James Lockwood wrote:
> > FPGA's.  VHDL requires some adjustment compared with procedural
> > programming languages, but it's amazing what can be done even without a
> > microprocessor in the picture.  Xilinx finally released their
> > compiler/programmer for free and the chips are incredibly cheap. 
> 
>   I've been dying to get into that stuff.  Can you offer any
> suggestions as to how to get started?

First thing to do is to pull down the FAQs for:

comp.arch.fpga
comp.lang.vhdl

There are many, many links to web sites containing resources.  My favorite
chips are from:

http://www.xilinx.com/
http://www.altera.com/

Programming information is free or near-free for most of their products.

A warning: VHDL can be tricky because every "instruction" executes
simultaneously.  It's difficult to get over the first hump in the learning
curve, but after that you can be amazingly clever (friend of mine has a
15-line chunk of VHDL which does async serial beautifully).

-James