Anyone here messed around with FPGA programming?

[GaryMcT]

The JROK Williams stuff has me interested in writing some FPGA code in a similar vein for other hardware.  Anyone have experience with this sort of thing?

[MonMotha]

I have done FPGA work.  The first thing you'll have to get around is that it is not "programming".  You don't give the hardware a set of instructions to accomplish sequentially, you're actually attempting to describe hardware.  The language you will use is referred to as a "hardware description language" for just this reason.  I prefer Verilog as it is less verbose than VHDL, but everybody seems to have a preference of their own.

I usually use Xilinx hardware.  You can get a S3E dev board for ~$100 from Digilent.  You can easily get started with just a copy of ISE Webpack and a simulator.

[GaryMcT]

Cool.  I'll have to look into that.  Thanks for the info!

I used to work at 3Dfx writing graphics demos back in the day. . I should have paid more attention to all the hardware guys implementing the chips in Verilog back then!

How hard is it to take a particular CPU and get it going with an FPGA board?  Do you have to do your own PCB layout to do this sort of thing?