is the Nexys A7 a good FPGA trainer board?
>>109255253It's expensive and a bit dated but it's good. Good support from digilent (from what I remember).What are you planning to use it for? If you have no plans, verilator will suffice until you have concrete use cases. (Having io is fun though, get something cheaper to start with if you're not sure yet)Also check the myir xc7a-100 dev board if you want an fpga the same size but less expensive
>>109255300just something to learn on and tinker with and build personal projects while I'm going through my EE degree.
How much do you know about working with an FPGA? I suggest starting with systemverilog and a simulator. Try building a 16 bit counter and simulating it with a cocotb testbench running verilator. First try it without using the always keyword and only assign. Do it with always_comb and always_ff after. If you want to run it physically, then get a tang 20k and make an led blink or whatever basic project you can follow along online. Get comfortable using Make files. Lint your code often with verilator's lint option. Yosys doesn't do systemverilog in the free tier, so you can use sv2v to translate it to verilog; you don't need to worry about this for verilator. I don't remember if Yosys works for gowin fpgas, but in that case you have apicula. Find the professor that teaches logic design and go to their office hours for some help if they have free time enoughhttps://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-buildhttps://github.com/YosysHQ/apiculahttps://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/tang/tang-nano-20k/nano-20k.htmlhttps://github.com/zachjs/sv2v
>>109255854I know basically nothing about FPGA, so I was going to start with this book. but I also have full access to my university's online library if you know anything else.
>>109255253no it is not. a good FPGA board should have atleas 2M LUTs anything less and its a toy. honestly I love FPGAs. if I would I would make one right now. I love FPGA so much it's unreal. I want to hug one and go to sleep.
>>109255882Learn HDL ([System]Verilog is a HDL) first.If you end up not liking that book, then Intro to SystemVerilog by Mehta and Digital Logic Design Using Verilog by Taraate, both on Springer. You could download ieee-1800 as reference too.As for community sites, chipverify is handy for quick reference. Hdlbits has exercises. Also learn a style guide and stick to it, verilog that I see online has bad formatting imohttps://github.com/lowRISC/style-guideshttps://github.com/bespoke-silicon-group/basejump_stl (see style guide section)
>>109255253all you need is download vivado set the board on the project wizard and start working.>>109255503>just something to learnwhat are you planning to learn? using IP cores and getting them synthesized on the fpga?that's useless.obviously you want to make your own uart, isp, i2c, etc cores and send data somewhere.well you can do that on software, fire up vivado, select any board start working.if you need to see if your ip core works, try using it against one of those that are ready.all the timing and other constraints are visible in vivado.the fpga boards are useless because you don't need to deploy anything.plus if you get to a certain point you will need to buy some other things like bus analyzer, or an oscilloscope or bench psu, a multimeter, but those are required only if you deploy what you make.if you want to tinker, learn some C and dig into Zephyr with a compatible board.get one of those nordicsemi bluetooth devkit boards make a bt headset out of it, a bt weather station, or something like that.
NTA but I'd like to do some FPGA stuff for /ham/ radio, such as FFT, waterfall, demodulation and direction finding. This is mainly for the HF band, so 65 MHz samplig rate is all that is needed.,MY main problem is to find the end of the yarm: like VHDL or Verilog? What FPGA and tool set to use? Unlike open source software, it seems most tools are locked down and expensive.
>>109255253Good luck on your FPGA journey! I recently looked into SpinalHDL and got it running on a much older Altera Cyclone II board that just has 1 button and 3 LEDs. I'm also dying to get a better trainer board with buttons, leds, 7 segments, HDMI, VGA, audio, USB, Ethernet, ... I'm starting out from the basics tho!
