Electrical Engineering help: FPGAs, CPLD, ASIC

[toalan]

Ummm I like to experiment with electronics and what not, I am a bit tired of embedded systems so I thought I might give FPGAs/CPLDs a shot, I have a few questions for those who know their stuff.

Are FPGA/CPLDs used primarily for prototyping work? the end product of working with FPGA/CPLDs is a design which you bring into ASIC? OR do people actually used FPGA/CPLDs in production devices?

I am planning to buy an altera education kit (UP3), http://www.altera.com/education/univ/kits/unv-kits.html
how good are these kits? are there better kits out there? how good are xlink products compared to altera.

Anyways I am pretty fresh to FPGA/CPLDs, although i did some in school, it was a few years ago.

Normally I work with AVRs and it has been a fantastic experience, but I am itching to do a bit more so I hope FPGA/CPLDs would be a nice change, I would one day like to learn how to design ASICS from beginning to end.

[B0000rt]

As I recall from my Embedded Systems class, the MAIN difference in Altera and Xilinx boards was something about how you could program the gate paths on the Xilinx, while on the Altera you could not.

As for using the FPGA devices in production models, I'm not sure, from what I've been told in class it was really only used for rapid prototyping (as they're pretty damned expensive).

I really didn't like using the FPGAs in that course, pretty tedious stuff, with that Educational kit, you're probably going to be using the same Quartus II, IDE (Max+PLUS was horrible never ever use that) which is pretty straightforward and easy to use. The boards themselves are pretty tough (don't try it urself though), friends have accidentally shorted out the board (Vcc to GND) and you would just unplug and replug the thing and you're back to normal!

What was more interesting was the second part of the course, where we would design the FPGA to do a certain something, and we would also code the HCS12 Freescale microcontroller to properly interface with the FPGA and use the device! Fun Assembler/C stuff!

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EDIT: Lol Scrap that previous paragraph, I just reread your post

Verilog is drab and boring

Are you in Electrical or Computer Engineering yourself?

[toalan]

I am electrical. Thanks for telling me that FPGA are for prototype use, I myself was having a hard time believing that people would use them in production work.

So once you are done the Design with FPGA/CPLDs and it works fine, do you just ship out the stuff to a fabrication plant, give them money and get the chips?

Are there analog equivants to FPGA/CPLDs? I mean if you wanna make an amplifier ASIC is there any hardware to prototype that?

I do not know if getting into FPGAs/CPLDs is even useful, microcontrollers are just so damn cheap and fast these days that for my own projects and experimenting I can not see where I would need a FPGA/CPLD. I guess i will still order the kit and see where it takes me, hopefully i will enjoy it and not end up selling the thing here for 10 bucks.

ty for the info

[2000fordfocus]

I am planning to buy an altera education kit (UP3), http://www.altera.com/education/univ/kits/unv-kits.html
how good are these kits? are there better kits out there? how good are xlink products compared to altera.

Hey, I used this exact altera kit in school before!! Is kind of outdated for us, so we didn't use it now~~

[toalan]

Hey, I used this exact altera kit in school before!! Is kind of outdated for us, so we didn't use it now~~

No way that is already dated? what do you guys use now?

[othy]

Companies do in fact use FPGAs in production stuff all the time. A lot of low-run, high cost, high margin devices use em (medical, imaging, video) especially in places where the algorithm might be still developing.

Also, the Xilinx spartanII and Altera Cyclone devices are really quite cheap and are used even in higher volume products. Things like set top boxes and occasionally even portable electronics..

There are a lot of factors that go into determining what the better path, asic or fpga would be.. In a lot of cases the intial cost of the asic is too prohibitive, or the fpga can offer the extra features that are needed..

In some cases the RTL can be brought from FPGA to ASIC, but you really have to develop the FPGA with that in mind.. Too often people use FPGA-specific libraries in their development and when they want to put it on an ASIC it goes all to hell. As long as you are doing the development for FPGA with ASIC in mind (helps to know even what libraries you might be using) you should be ok..

[chdude3]

Companies do in fact use FPGAs in production stuff all the time. A lot of low-run, high cost, high margin devices use em (medical, imaging, video) especially in places where the algorithm might be still developing.

Also, the Xilinx spartanII and Altera Cyclone devices are really quite cheap and are used even in higher volume products. Things like set top boxes and occasionally even portable electronics..

There are a lot of factors that go into determining what the better path, asic or fpga would be.. In a lot of cases the intial cost of the asic is too prohibitive, or the fpga can offer the extra features that are needed..

In some cases the RTL can be brought from FPGA to ASIC, but you really have to develop the FPGA with that in mind.. Too often people use FPGA-specific libraries in their development and when they want to put it on an ASIC it goes all to hell. As long as you are doing the development for FPGA with ASIC in mind (helps to know even what libraries you might be using) you should be ok..

An excellent response.

We also use FPGAs because it's a low-volume product, and because the functionality is constantly changing between various iterations of the product.

And very sadly, because of budget and legacy, we're stuck using Max PLUS. I'm hoping I can at least get these guys to move to Verilog instead of schematic based entry! You can obviously tell that it's not that complicated if they started with schematic based stuff...

[goob3r]

The Altera software, Quartus II is the biggest piece of crap ever. It's been over a year since I last used it, but from what I remember it's incredibly slow and crashes a lot and just a general pain in the ass to work with.

[TenzoR]

The Altera software, Quartus II is the biggest piece of crap ever. It's been over a year since I last used it, but from what I remember it's incredibly slow and crashes a lot and just a general pain in the ass to work with.

i dun mind it, but it is slow

have you tried the new NIOS boards sooo nice

[2000fordfocus]

No way that is already dated? what do you guys use now?

In the undergrad days, we use this board to do stuff like a decay counter, flash some light, etc...

Since last year, we have switch and build our own stuff using surface mount! No micro or anything(thatz another class), what we have is a printed circuit build with standard pad on it, and we get student to mount some IC to it, such as counter, shifter, various gate, BCD encoder, divider, etc... our output are some LED light and 7 segment display... Student learn how to make latch, counter, how to do shift stuff(a mockup transmittion line), etc... I know the detail b/c I had work as a lab assistant for over 2 years now! This digital electronic and micro electronic class is the most fun!! We switch to a new micro this year, using the motorola 9S12!! awesome!

[d_jedi]

FPGA:
- Faster time to market
- Lower startup cost, but higher per unit cost
- Slower

ASIC:
- More difficult to design
- More expensive to design/fab.. but low per unit cost once things get going.
- Faster circuit.

That's the basics.
Basically, you use FPGAs for low-yield production devices and for prototyping. You use ASICs for high-yield production devices, and for ones where speed is a factor.

[toalan]

I was just browsing the digikey catalog in my spare time looking at microcontrollers and I noticed that there are lots of FGPAs that are only a few dollars each. Wow that is dirt cheap, Atmel seems to have some pretty cheap stuff for FPGAs.

Thanks guys for the info, I am gonna start dreaming about starting a project where I can mix FGPA and the AVR MCU together.

Its funny, when I was in school I hated this stuff, now I really enjoy it. Oh how the times have changed. Thanks again guys.

[baileyr]

Some of the production products that I've worked on also have FPGA's on them. It allows us to change the functionality after the product has left our hands. With an ASIC - that becomes quite difficult...

I never did any actual FPGA design, my group was responsible for the C++ application that programmed the devices (so I can't be much more help!).