bobrics said:
Hi,
I have some experience with Xilinx FPGA's and Webpack tool. I was
thinking about doing some project for fun at home and found Pluto
board that uses Altera FPGA.
Is it easy to jump from one system to another one in terms of
learning time?
There are really two parts to this: one is the tools, and the other is
the devices themselves.
The tools are pretty comparable -- to me, Quartus seems more
integrated, where ISE is more a collection of individual pieces. For
example, in Quartus, you have one place that you setup things like the
colors for almost any tool, where ISE has a separate setup screen for
each individual tool. Quartus also supports Tcl, so you can create your
own toolbar buttons and assign scripts to them. Then again, I've never
really used this, and never particularly missed it in ISE either.
The hardware depends a lot on which exact chips you compare -- the
Pluto board seems to use an Acex 1K part, which is fairly comparable to
a Xilinx Spartan 2. If you're using to something newer (e.g. a Spartan
3) your design might easily use features it's missing, so you may have
to write your own logic for them, and/or lose some performance. OTOH,
if you've used mostly older Xilinx parts (e.g. the original Spartan)
you'll probably find some new features you didn't get to play with
before (unfortunately, my memory that far back is slightly undertain,
so I'm hard put to say more about this with certainty).
Most typical code, however, works about the same with one as the other.
I've never tried to do a careful comparison, but as a general
impression the comparable Altera parts generally seem a little faster
than their Xilinx counterparts.