Let me toss in my two cents worth. From your description, it is not
clear if the code you want to examine is behavioral VHDL which is
written like a C program to describe the behavior of a system (and is
not necessarily synthesizable) or if your code is RTL form which can be
synthesized. You also do not say if you will be writing new code or if
you just need to learn what the existing code does.
If you have behavioral code that is not synthesized (put in a form to
load into your hardware) and you do not need to write any code, you
don't have a hard job ahead. The fact that you know a programming
language is a head start. But you need to learn how VHDL describes
"concurrent" statement which are treated as if they all run in parallel
rather than sequentially like C. And keep in mind that "processes" are
nothing like subroutines. They are used to describe sections of
hardware that are more easily described with sequential statements
rather than parallel ones. To modularize your code use entities.
If I assume that you need to write your own RTL (register transfer
language) code to build hardware, then you have a much tougher job
ahead. In that case I advise that you focus on learning how to design
hardware and then learn how to *describe* the hardware in VHDL. One of
the problems I often see is when a designer trys to think in the VHDL
language without consideration of what hardware the tool should be
making from the code. Instead, I always design my hardware first,
sometimes down to the detailed equations to go into a given LUT, and
then write my VHDL to describe exactly this arrangement of hardware.
Finally, don't bother with a board or FPGA until you actually need to
make something happen in the real world. You can work much, much better
in a simulator until you have the design working the way it should.
Only then should you bother to synthesize it and test it in hardware.
Hardware is much harder to debug.
Good luck and let us know how it goes...
Hi,
I would suggest that
Reading the book first and know VHDL is not a good idea at all! HDL is
a hardware discription language. Try to buit a small electronics
circuit like casacade three 8- bit counters and connect them together
through wires. buy 8 bit counters, hook them to power supply u know
..u can find lots of electronics circuit examples on the internet and
then simulate the same circuit in VHDL and compare the result and
during this project read the things form the book which will help you
in this small project.. Remember its not a programming language like
C++ its a discription langauge. so learn how to design electronics
hardware and then on that knowledge learn how to discribe that
hardware in VHDL...
Regards
john
--
Rick "rickman" Collins
(e-mail address removed)
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
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