Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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I think GPUs took off because the specific problems they solve were quite well-defined and enough people in the videogame/3d grapics market agreed about which protocols to use. Even for things like Photoshop and other general-purpose graphics software, GPU support seems to be a bit hit and miss.

I actualy have 2 FPGA-based devices that I use daily - polyphonic analog synthesizers, to be specific. Manufacturers are tight-lipped about how they're using the FPGAs, but it appears to be for ultra-rapid reconfiguration of analog circuit topologies without the load time delays that result from a traditional microcontroller > D/A converter arrangement. There are also field-programmable analog arrays on the market, but I have yet to see one in a commercial product and it seems like they have some way to go before being economical for audio synthesis applications.

I love FPGAs although I don't know much about how to et started with programming them. There is an ASIC coming out of patent in a year or so which I'd like to re-implement in an FPGA package, and I've thought about reaching out to the original architect who lives nearby and is a friendly fellow. I'm not sure how feasible this is, though.

I'd second the DE2 suggestion. It's a cheap, but pretty versatile board. It has lots of companion demos and tutorials, as well as a ton of resources online from other starters asking "How the heck do I do <task> on my DE2???" on forums and such.

Quartus II Web Edition is Altera's free IDE, and it comes with pretty much everything you need: a big suite of libraries (most of which are also free to use), a graphical entry environment, an HDL editor, the full synthesis toolchain, and integrated Eclipse tools for writing embedded C/C++/ASM code. Other than that all you'd need to get is ModelSim-altera, the free version of the standard simulation environment.

Altera also has some pretty comprehensive (i) free online training, (ii) IP block, i.e. library, documentation, and (iii) complete reference designs. I'd recommend checking out all three, especially (i), since at the beginning it's easy to get tunnel vision just learning VHDL or whatever, and then realize that you're somewhat clueless as to how to actually get things done in any useful capacity. There's a dizzying amount of jargon and proprietary bullshit, so it's useful to just have someone tell you what everything means, and How It's Done(tm).

All that said, if that ASIC is anything complicated it might be a bit of a big project to jump into. That and it's possible that it would require more resources than an entry level board will supply.

To get started with FPGAs just download one of the free IDEs and have a play. You can buy dev boards for under $100 to get some feedback that what you are doing really works.

Can you recommend some boards? Whenever I looked into it, I got overwhelmed with all the options and I was not quite sure what to look for.

The Altera DE2 is great to start off with, and it's also heavily discounted for University students.

The Basys 2 is a little old, but it's very simple and easy.

The DE1-SoC board is $199 or $150 with a student discount. http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...

It has an ARM processor on the same chip as the FPGA, which I've found to be incredibly useful.

If you don't want the ARM processor, the regular DE1 is somewhat cheaper: $150 or $125 w/ student discount.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...

Yeah, the SoC boards a nice. So much of what you want to do on an FPGA these days requires the use of a processor anyhow, you might as well have an actual hard block instead of a NIOSII or whatever. We use DE1's at my company as the FPGA analog (pun not intended) of a Arduino Uno, for when we want to do a quick test of some part of a design in hardware, or want to stick the device into something but don't want to tie up a high end unit for something trivial.

Be aware that the DE1 has pretty limited resources for somethings. For exmaple, the on-chip memory can get tapped out pretty quickly when doing embedded applications, and it has less I/O and less RAM available off-chip.

Also note that the DE1-SoC actually uses a Cyclone V device, whereas the original DE-1 uses a Cyclone II, a nearly discontinued chip that is a big step down.

Intrigued by FPGA's capabilities, when checking out my classmate's profile http://orangesorter.com/, I started looking into some development kits to learn.

I found great documentation and economical boards starting at $55 available here: http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/

BTW, I also found Scala based hardware construction language Chisel very interesting https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/.

The "Parallella" hybrid board is awesome, but unfortunately has been saturated by orders, probably due to being $99. It contains a Xilinx dual ARM CPU with FPGA plus a custom Epiphany 16-core processor. http://parallella.org/

Which synthesizers?

An Elektron Analog Four and a DSI Tempest (possibly about to be replaced with another Elektron box). I can dig up pictures of the PCBs if that's helpful but I don't have the knowledge for detailed analysis of how it works.

Thanks for the other replies on dev boards etc.

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