[chbot] Introduction (was: Re: Last two and a bit days of the garage sale....)

[follower at rancidbacon.com]

Thanks for your reply Sean...

> I have a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA development board
> (http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-SPAR3-SK-UNI-G.htm) which
> only cost me $100 US + shipping, it's $150 on the site at the moment.
> This has a 200K gate FPGA.
Do you have something specific that you're working on?

I've noticed that Diligent has some interesting, and seemingly
reasonable priced FPGA starter boards, like this one:
<http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=BASYS&Nav1=Products&Nav2=Programmable>
I've not had any direct experience with them though.

> The programming software, Xilinx Webpack can be downloaded for free
> (it's 1.8 Gig so might take a while)
Yeah, that's what I'm planning to be splurging any leftover bandwidth
this month on. :-)

> you can atleast do VHDL
> synthesis, I don't know about Verilog.
I'm pretty sure it does Verilog also. I think it also does both their
FPGA & CPLD lines and has a Linux version.

>From looking at prices on chips for "deployment" I've pretty much
decided that I'm probably better to start off with CPLD. From a quick
look they're available online for ~$NZ5 for something like a Xilunx
XC9536 (plus insane shipping of course).

I also found a "build your own" board for the XC9536 in a PLCC
package: <http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller/pld_starter.html>

Digilent also sell CPLD in a DIP module:
<http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=CMOD&Nav1=Products&Nav2=Programmable>
for ~$US20 plus a JTAG cable (the USB version of which is twice the
price of the module).

--Phil.