FPGA Central

Hi members,
I am a student and completely new to FPGA. I am learning VHDL. My
objective is to implement FFT in spartan-3 starter kit. I would like to
know how many months it will take me to fully design it. As a novice i
would like to know few suggestions and references for my project. I
need help. I don't know from where to start.

You are not completely new to FPGA, that was yesterday when you came
with the same question, ...
A good starting point is google.com, my advice is to try something less
complex and after you became familiar with the flow ....
one step at a time.

Aurash

biot wrote:

>Hi members,
> I am a student and completely new to FPGA. I am learning VHDL. My
>objective is to implement FFT in spartan-3 starter kit. I would like to
>know how many months it will take me to fully design it. As a novice i
>would like to know few suggestions and references for my project. I
>need help. I don't know from where to start.
>
>
>


--
__
/ /\/\ Aurelian Lazarut
\ \ / System Verification Engineer
/ / \ Xilinx Ireland
\_\/\/

phone: 353 01 4032639
fax: 353 01 4640324

Well,

This is where I would start.

If you are familiar with hardware architecture in terms of what performance
you need and how fast or parallel processing required (no VHDL needed!), you
may choose one mathematically familiar implementation, among several FFT
implementations, you can image the architecture in terms of multipliers &&
accumulators && registers (let's call it microarchitecture of your design).

One you have done that, the rest is piece of cake, really.
Study VHDL, do some minor projects for a few days and then you would be able
to estimate your performance better than anybody in this newsgroup.

There is a way to have FFT as a core / reference, but i would not recommend
this, if the goal is to study FPGAs.

Hope this helps.

Vladislav

"biot" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] ups.com...
>
> Hi members,
> I am a student and completely new to FPGA. I am learning VHDL. My
> objective is to implement FFT in spartan-3 starter kit. I would like to
> know how many months it will take me to fully design it. As a novice i
> would like to know few suggestions and references for my project. I
> need help. I don't know from where to start.
>

Thank you Vladislav !!!
My objective is to study both FPGA and computer architecture. I have
prelimnary knowledge about architecture and I am trying to design
simple 4-bit ALU /CPU using VHDL. I think i have virually completed it.
As a student I am in process of learing. I want to know more on FPGA,
Please suggest me where to start learning and also let me know your
recommendation.

What can I say?

When I just joined the industry, there was a nice time where the university
did not really teach FPGAs, so I had to learn about them in the industry.
That is why I really cannot recommend you any book or something like this...
Learn as much as you can and use the newsgroup, this is very educative...
no kidding.

Vladislav


"biot" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] ups.com...
> Thank you Vladislav !!!
> My objective is to study both FPGA and computer architecture. I have
> prelimnary knowledge about architecture and I am trying to design
> simple 4-bit ALU /CPU using VHDL. I think i have virually completed it.
> As a student I am in process of learing. I want to know more on FPGA,
> Please suggest me where to start learning and also let me know your
> recommendation.
>

I have found a couple of books to be very good in learning VHDL and FPGA
architecture, in general:

1. "VHDL Programming by Example" by Douglas L. Perry
2. "Circuit Design with VHDL" by Volnei A. Pedroni

The former is a very good introduction to VHDL. It has a good referenece
section in the back for later use, also.
The latter is a more circuits oriented approach using VHDL. This
concentrates more on circuit structures.

Check the titles at Amazon or your favorite book outlet to get more detail
on these and other books on the subject.

Hope this helps.

Dave

"biot" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] ups.com...
> Thank you Vladislav !!!
> My objective is to study both FPGA and computer architecture. I have
> prelimnary knowledge about architecture and I am trying to design
> simple 4-bit ALU /CPU using VHDL. I think i have virually completed it.
> As a student I am in process of learing. I want to know more on FPGA,
> Please suggest me where to start learning and also let me know your
> recommendation.
>

Thank you DAVE
Yeah I am following this book "VHDL Programming by Example" by Douglas
L. Perry