FPGA Central

I am an M.Sc. Instrumentation Science student in Univ. of Pune,India.
I am supposed to cover six 1/2 hr. seminars on FPGAs & CPLDs. I would
like to know more infromation about what an FPGA or CPLD comprises of
completely. If you know of any such resource/white paper, pls reply
here or mail me at : [email protected]
I am covering VHDL, Desigin considerations for FPGAs and its Boards,
and a few case studies. If you have any info. regarding this pls reply
or mail me.

"Amit Olkar" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] om...
> I am an M.Sc. Instrumentation Science student in Univ. of Pune,India.
> I am supposed to cover six 1/2 hr. seminars on FPGAs & CPLDs. I would
> like to know more infromation about what an FPGA or CPLD comprises of
> completely. If you know of any such resource/white paper, pls reply
> here or mail me at : [email protected]
> I am covering VHDL, Desigin considerations for FPGAs and its Boards,
> and a few case studies. If you have any info. regarding this pls reply
> or mail me.

The best way to learn this stuff is to buy a couple of small CPLD chips like
the Xilinx XC9536 or the Altera EPM7064, design and make a small PCB with
the chip, a clock, programming interface and breadboarding area, buy or make
a programming adapter, download the free development software provided by
Xilinx and Altera and start playing with it. It'll only take a day or two to
get started and you'll learn far more than just reading about it. I've got
one or two designs on my web site that will help you get started.

Leon
--
Leon Heller, G1HSM
http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller

Try looking at the material located at:

http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/crabill

This might be a good start.
Eric

Amit Olkar wrote:
>
> I am an M.Sc. Instrumentation Science student in Univ. of Pune,India.
> I am supposed to cover six 1/2 hr. seminars on FPGAs & CPLDs. I would
> like to know more infromation about what an FPGA or CPLD comprises of
> completely. If you know of any such resource/white paper, pls reply
> here or mail me at : [email protected]
> I am covering VHDL, Desigin considerations for FPGAs and its Boards,
> and a few case studies. If you have any info. regarding this pls reply
> or mail me.

"Amit Olkar" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] om...
> I am an M.Sc. Instrumentation Science student in Univ. of Pune,India.
> I am supposed to cover six 1/2 hr. seminars on FPGAs & CPLDs. I would
> like to know more infromation about what an FPGA or CPLD comprises of
> completely. If you know of any such resource/white paper, pls reply
> here or mail me at : [email protected]
> I am covering VHDL, Desigin considerations for FPGAs and its Boards,
> and a few case studies. If you have any info. regarding this pls reply
> or mail me.

I think one very accessible and good starting point would be to read the
data-sheets of some the FPGA and CPLD families offered by Altera and Xilinx.
These two companies are the big players in the market and together, I think
they sell more than 90% of all FPGAs and CPLDs. For each family of their
devices they have one big data-sheet that reviews the whole architecture of
the device with details of the logic-cells, the routing and I/O pins. These
data-sheets are freely available from both companies websites.