> Do you know of any tools for designing FPGAs?
>
> phma
(hope you don't mind; I'm posting to the list in case anyone else is
interested)
The one I used is from Viewlogic (www.viewlogic.com). They have a full set
of programs for designing, simulating, routing and programming FPGA's. It
is a VERY nice set of tools, but as you might guess, VERY expensive as well.
I did just order a 30 day evaluation CD from them though...it's been 5 years
since I've used their Viewdraw and Viewsim programs; it'll be interesting to
see how it's changed.
On the flipside, there are programs out there that can let you design,
simulate, route, etc. that are free, but they are text based in nature and,
believe me, not as intuitive to use.
Besides all that, there is a "language" called ABEL that lets you define
your logic tables and will assist in doing the actual gate/timing designs.
There are free versions such as one I used to from Intel...a text based
thing of course. I'm not sure they still make it or not...plus, there is
one that Viewlogic has, but I've never actually used it, though I heard it
was pretty easy to use (graphical of course).
Viewlogic supports all the different types of FPGA's and PLD's out there via
plug-in device libraries (purchased separately of course). As you can
imagine, if you want to do FPGA design, the development can get pretty
expensive. Then if you want to move beyond simulation on a program and
actually program a device, you can opt to either buy a "testbed" which is
essentially a serial cable to go from your PC to the chip, and usually a
little "glue logic" such as tie-down resistors for the chip and a ZIF socket
to hold the FPGA itself. These aren't usually too expensive, or if you know
what you need you can just build your own...the component parts probably
aren't more than $20-$30 for the whole hardware setup.
Hardware costs once you want to go into production are more since you will
most likely be programming a PROM to hold your program, plus a little
circuitry to automatically program the FPGA once it's powered on...not too
bad, but an EPROM programmer would be needed as well. But if you managed to
build something as an add-on for a PC, I would envision you could tie it in
to the PCI bus and program it via a datafile on the PC, eliminating the PROM
altogether. I designed an ISA interface once which is pretty easy...I
wonder if PCI is just as easy to tie into (nothing fancy...just an I/O
address, no IRQ or DMA or anything).
Actually, if you were to design something that was a 256bit multiplier, the
IO wouldn't need to be terribly fast...it would just get 2 256-bit numbers
and spit out a 512-bit number... Using the ISA bus which is 16 bits wide,
you could send or receive 512 bits in only 64 chunks...at 8.77 MHz, it'd
take ~7.3 microseconds for that alone. On the other hand, PCI could do it
(33.3 MHz and 32 bits) in 0.96 microseconds... I guess it depends on how
long the multiply itself would take as to whether PCI would really speed up
the whole thing significantly or not.
Aaron
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