Altera FPGA's

[Ed]

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in programming Altera FPGA's? In particular
a FLEX8000. What development environment do you use and how much does it
cost? Do any free development environments exist for it (VHDL or Verilog)?
Also, is the programming hardware expensive?

Thanks for any info,

 

[Leon Heller]

"Ed" <Ed@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:cdjh0q$uvr$1@news8.svr.pol.co.uk...

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in programming Altera FPGA's? In
particular
a FLEX8000. What development environment do you use and how much does it
cost? Do any free development environments exist for it (VHDL or
Verilog)?
Also, is the programming hardware expensive?

The free Quartus software you can download from the Altera web site doesn't
support the FLEX 8000, which Altera describes as 'mature'. More recent
devices are supported with VHDL and Verilog. You should use one of those.

The ByteBlaster required for programming Altera devices is quite expensive
at $150, but I made my own. Details are on my web site.

Leon
--
Leon Heller, G1HSM
http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller

 

[Rene Tschaggelar]

Ed wrote:

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in programming Altera FPGA's? In particular
a FLEX8000. What development environment do you use and how much does it
cost? Do any free development environments exist for it (VHDL or Verilog)?
Also, is the programming hardware expensive?

The flex series is outdated, choose another one.
There is an application note on how to build a Byteblaster
parallelport adapter. Basically a '244 plus a set of
resistors and capacitors. There are also alternative sources
in case you don't have the time to build one.

Rene
--
Ing.Buero R.Tschaggelar - http://www.ibrtses.com
& commercial newsgroups - http://www.talkto.net

 

[Arash Salarian]

"Ed" <Ed@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:cdjh0q$uvr$1@news8.svr.pol.co.uk...

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in programming Altera FPGA's? In
particular
a FLEX8000. What development environment do you use and how much does it
cost? Do any free development environments exist for it (VHDL or
Verilog)?
Also, is the programming hardware expensive?

Sure, quite a lot of people have LOTS of experience in programming Altera
FPGA's. Millions of FPGA chips that Altera sells are somehow being used and
programmed by people, right?
Back to your question. FLEX8000 series are now outdated and it is strongly
advised not to start a new design with them as you may not be able to find
them in the market with ease. However, if you already have a number of them
in stock, surely you can use them with ease.
The flagship design software of Altera, Quartus, does not support these old
devices and you should try their old series of the design software named
"Max Plus II". There is a free version of it available on the Altera's
website but it only supports two devices from this series: EPF8452A and
EPF84282A. For the other devices of the 8000 series you need the full
version of the Max Plus II but buying it is not a good idea as it is now
replaced by Quartus and will not be evolved any longer. The free version of
the software does not have a VHDL or Verilog compiler and synthesizer and
only supports schematics and also altera's own language "AHDL". However, if
you already have a third-party synthesizer like Synplify, you can use them
as they support this series.
You don't program a Flex8000 device. They are SRAM based devices that read
the configuration data when they power on. Altera makes small, 8 pin serial
EEPROMs that you can program them with the programming files from Max Plus
II and then connect them to the 8000 device. The old EEPROMs of altera
needed special programmers (or you could use an Universal Programmer) but
there is also a new series of these devices (based on Flash memory) that can
be programmed using a simple JTAG cable. One example is EPC1 device. For
prototypoing, you can ofcourse forget about the programming and just use a
JTAG cable to directly configure the 8000 device from a computer. You can
build a JTAG cable by yourself and you can find the details and schematics
in Altera's application notes.
Anyway, the best advice I can give you is to forget about the Flex8000
series and switch to a new family like Cyclone (or alternatively Spartan
series from Xilinx). One big advantage will be that the freely available
developement programs from both Xilinx and Altera come with a VHDL/Verilog
compiler/synthesizer and you need not to worry about the availability of the
device for a couple of years.

Regards
Arash