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by lovelyviking
938 days ago
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Thank you very much. I do prefer to start with small. This way I made whole emulation of my first computer showing assembler commands as it executes each operation and it was able to run original ROM successfully. It was a pleasure to observe. Hopefully I can reproduce it in FPGA to make the circle complete ;) My challenge is to play with CPU designs at some point but in the beginning I agree it is easier to start with something like led blink, nand , register and then to other staff. Is there some FPGA hardware you can advice to use for easy start? One that potentially(once I learn) capable to do let’s say UART or USB ? I do not know really how much of FPGA power required for those. Or it would be too big/expensive ? I can’t orient myself with this yet but I wish something physical to have for real motivation to ignite. |
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It may sound like shilling, but the Analogue Pocket is actually an excellent development platform because it's everything all in one; you don't need to figure out how to take input, load data, or output to HDMI, because that's all taken care of you automatically. Now you pay for that in having a $200-250 price tag, plus ~$50-70 for your JTAG adapter, but I think it's excellent for starting.
For OSS, I would probably recommend a Lattice FPGA. Gowin FPGAs are really, really cheap (Tang Nano 9k), and _partially_ support an OSS toolchain, but it's missing many core components, and I've actually found bugs in the hardware (confirmed by others), so probably stay away.
The DE-10 Nano is very capable, though fairly sought after at this point. It has a decent amount of IO, and can run the MiSTer retrocomputing project, which has the largest collection of OSS cores out there.
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However, probably before you even buy any hardware, play with simulations. Choose your HDL (Verilog is US focused, VHDL is EU focused) and choose a simulator. For VHDL, you can use GHDL and GTKWave for an entirely OSS setup. For Verilog, I would recommend downloading the closed source Intel ModelSim, but you can also produce very fast, C++ controlled simulations using Verilator.
In any case, start simulating and looking at waveforms. Debugging multiple sets of nets at once is a very interesting experience and is at the core of what you're doing when working with FPGAs (verification is something like 80-90% of the time), so you can learn a lot without any hardware just working on that. If you use Verilator, you can have psuedo LEDs or even a display to draw on.