Working in a small company, you often have to do a whole bunch of things. There’s no “Hardware Architect” or “Layout Guy” or “Test Engineer” or “Firmware Engineer”, it always seems like I got one more job title. Anyways, I’ve been assigned to design the electronics of a display system that requires an FPGA. I have done HDL work before, but it was mostly for simple systems involving just an FPGA. This time it is a full-on system, with busses, DSP’s, microcontrollers and the kitchen sink.
The first two prototypes came out okay. They did what they were suppose to do, however, upon completing the prototypes, I realized that I have no idea how to design a chip. It gives a new appreciation for all those RTL teams out there making IC’s. I’m trying to get my hands on some famous HDL books: “HDL Chip Design” by D. J. Smith and “Essential VHDL” by S. Rajan, but apparently they are out of print. However, over the Christmas break I was able to get some reading done. It was a book called “Hardware/Firmware Interface Design” by Gary Stringham. I thought it was a good book, but what I found really interesting is the atmosphere he paints of what it is like to work for Hewlett-Packard, programming printers all day. Seems like there’s a lot of complaining back and forth between the ASIC and firmware people. It’s a good read and gave me a few hints on how the interface to a chip should be designed.
-J
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What kind of FPGA are you using? (I work at Altera)
Hi Kati!
Wow, well, two years ago we were using Altera, but we are currently using Spartans from Xilinx (Sorry!). What do you do at Altera?
-J
I’m in marketing, and I’m very sorry to hear that you’re using our competitor! If you’re interested in learning some basics of FPGA design, we have an FPGA Designer curriculum (free) that you can go through via our web site: http://www.altera.com/education/training/curriculum/fpga/trn-fpga.html. It might be a good supplement to the Stringham book. Good luck!
Thanks Kati,
I’ll take a look at it this weekend. I’m not new to HDL work, so the basics are there, but it’ll still be a great read to understand the differences between the Xilinx and Altera platforms. I did my thesis using the Spartans so when it came time to make a purchasing decisions it was a no brainer (yeah.. I do the purchasing as well).
I did hear from my colleagues that Quartus is a bit more intuitive than ISE, although I believe he said that 2 or 3 years ago. Several revisions must have gone by since the comment. Right now we are using Spartan 3′s although we are looking to upgrade to the Spartan 6′s in the coming year. The major barrier to entry for us is the video IP toolset from Xilinx (and Altera). Each module is something like $10K – $20K, which is just ridiculous (for a small company). We ended up writing our own IP cores for all video processing (color correction, video capture, etc).
There is a need for scaling in the near future, do you know what is the approximate price of a video scaling core from Altera?
-J
Hi, I wanted you to know that I saw your request but didn’t get a chance to find the pricing today. (I don’t understand why we don’t list it on our site!) I’ll get back to you tomorrow…
BTW, where are you located?
Kati
Northern VA.
Hi again,
I got the info: Altera sells a Video & Image Processing IP suite that includes a scaler: http://www.altera.com/products/ip/dsp/image_video_processing/m-alt-vipsuite.html The list price is $4,995 (much more reasonable than what you listed above.) In addition to the scaler core, there’s an alpha blending mixer, color space converter, and other cores that are included in that price.
You might be interested in trying out one of our Nios Embedded Eval Kits (http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc3-embedded.html) for $449. On this kit, you can run VIP designs, including dynamic scaling and clipping, using designs posted in the Nios Wiki:
http://www.nioswiki.com/User:Suhel_Dhanani/Video_processing_designs_using_Altera_VIP
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or would like to be introduced to a salesperson to get more info or details.
Kati
Thanks Kati,
I’m looking through the literature right now. 5K is actually not that bad.
-J