Beginners advice for selecting an environment for FPGA desig

A

Andreas Holz

Guest
Hello all,

I'm thinking about a project to reimplement old processor designs
(Symbolics Lisp-machines or a Control-Data cyber 17x, 18x in a chip)
using modern programmable hardware, e.g. FPGA's.

The complete hardware documentation for these platform is available.

My knowledge in this task in not up-to-date, as I've not been working
on hardware design for almost ten years (onyl software!).

I would like to get some suggestions about a FPGA Development
environment and programming system to use for this task. Any other
suggestions or links to similar projects are very welcome.

If there are other people interested in such kind of project, please
contact me directly.

This is not a commercial project!

Andreas
 
Andreas Holz wrote:
Hello all,

I'm thinking about a project to reimplement old processor designs
(Symbolics Lisp-machines or a Control-Data cyber 17x, 18x in a chip)
using modern programmable hardware, e.g. FPGA's.

The complete hardware documentation for these platform is available.

My knowledge in this task in not up-to-date, as I've not been working
on hardware design for almost ten years (onyl software!).

I would like to get some suggestions about a FPGA Development
environment and programming system to use for this task. Any other
suggestions or links to similar projects are very welcome.

If there are other people interested in such kind of project, please
contact me directly.

This is not a commercial project!

Andreas
Click to expand...
This would be an interesting project and might even make a good project
for an advanced class in processor design. If I am not mistaken, there
is a web site or sites where others are working on similar projects. I
have seen projects on PDP-xx machines as well as others. Certainly this
is not a difficult task.

I would recommend that you find a board using a Xilinx FPGA since they
provide more complete design tools for free. The current Altera tools
do not include an HDL simulator. I am assumming of course that you
intend to use an HDL, and I also recommend it.

Here is a list of some FPGA board vendors...

http://www.fpga-faq.com/FPGA_Boards.shtml

Do a Google search on this and find some of the individuals doing
similar projects. I am sure they can give you some good advice.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
 
Also, search this newsgroup using "beginner" to find threads with ideas on
how to get started. There was a recent one where sort of listed a suggested
set of steps to get going.


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net
where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"




"Andreas Holz" <asholz@topinform.com> wrote in message
news:1795018.0310220045.189e6970@posting.google.com...
Hello all,

I'm thinking about a project to reimplement old processor designs
(Symbolics Lisp-machines or a Control-Data cyber 17x, 18x in a chip)
using modern programmable hardware, e.g. FPGA's.

The complete hardware documentation for these platform is available.

My knowledge in this task in not up-to-date, as I've not been working
on hardware design for almost ten years (onyl software!).

I would like to get some suggestions about a FPGA Development
environment and programming system to use for this task. Any other
suggestions or links to similar projects are very welcome.

If there are other people interested in such kind of project, please
contact me directly.

This is not a commercial project!

Andreas
Click to expand...
 
Just to provide some clarification on one of Rick's comments below, an
HDL simulation package *is* included with one of our Quartus II
subscriptions at no additional cost. Specifically, we provide Model
Technology™ ModelSimŽ-Altera for VHDL or Verilog HDL simulation. Have
a look at http://www.altera.com/products/software/order/ord-subscription.html
for more details.

Hope this helps.

Chris Balough
Director, Software and Tools Marketing
Altera Corp.
cbalough@altera.com


rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<3F967A05.37B0A649@yahoo.com>...
Andreas Holz wrote:

Hello all,

I'm thinking about a project to reimplement old processor designs
(Symbolics Lisp-machines or a Control-Data cyber 17x, 18x in a chip)
using modern programmable hardware, e.g. FPGA's.

The complete hardware documentation for these platform is available.

My knowledge in this task in not up-to-date, as I've not been working
on hardware design for almost ten years (onyl software!).

I would like to get some suggestions about a FPGA Development
environment and programming system to use for this task. Any other
suggestions or links to similar projects are very welcome.

If there are other people interested in such kind of project, please
contact me directly.

This is not a commercial project!

Andreas

This would be an interesting project and might even make a good project
for an advanced class in processor design. If I am not mistaken, there
is a web site or sites where others are working on similar projects. I
have seen projects on PDP-xx machines as well as others. Certainly this
is not a difficult task.

I would recommend that you find a board using a Xilinx FPGA since they
provide more complete design tools for free. The current Altera tools
do not include an HDL simulator. I am assumming of course that you
intend to use an HDL, and I also recommend it.

Here is a list of some FPGA board vendors...

http://www.fpga-faq.com/FPGA_Boards.shtml

Do a Google search on this and find some of the individuals doing
similar projects. I am sure they can give you some good advice.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
Click to expand...
 
cbalough@altera.com (Chris Balough) writes:

Just to provide some clarification on one of Rick's comments below, an
HDL simulation package *is* included with one of our Quartus II
subscriptions at no additional cost. Specifically, we provide Model
Technologyžš ModelSimÂŽ-Altera for VHDL or Verilog HDL simulation. Have
a look at http://www.altera.com/products/software/order/ord-subscription.html
for more details.
Click to expand...
To further calrify :)-) - I think Rick's point was that of the "free"
tools, Webpack offers Modelsim-XE whereas Quartus offers the built-in
simulator only. Unless that's changed since I last looked?

Martin.

--
martin.j.thompson@trw.com
TRW Conekt, Solihull, UK
http://www.trw.com/conekt
 
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