[Noisebridge-discuss] misc FPGA questions

[Dr. Jesus]

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Mike Schachter <mike at mindmech.com> wrote:
>
> Hola noisebridge-discuss! A long time ago I used Symphony-EDA
> to debug an FPGA:
>
> http://www.symphonyeda.com/
>
> Some day I'd like to buy an FPGA and play around with it, but
> they seem to cost like $500+. I don't really know much about them,
> and was wondering if anyone could help me with some questions:
>
> 1) Are there free, open source IDE's available for writing code
> for a FPGA?

I was taught to do it in emacs and pretty much everyone I've ever
worked with used either it or their favorite text editor for the HDL.

> 2) Where can I buy an FPGA cheaply? What is "cheap" for an FPGA?
> I want to use them for parallel processing, mostly for prototypes,
> and don't really care how much power they consume. I need a
> starter FPGA (which I will probably break) to learn the ropes.

There's a Spartan-3E board I donated to Noisebridge somewhere on one
of the hack shelves.

Stanford also has some NetFPGAs they made available to us, but you
need to bring your own software licenses to drive it since they're too
big for WebPack ISE.

> 3) Does anyone know FPGAs enough to teach a class in it? I'd be
> into some sort of knowledge exchange or maybe a donation to Noisebridge
> in return for an "Introduction to FPGAs" class.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978206

I can help you with whatever you still need to know after watching the
course.  Note that there are archives of other semesters of CS150
besides the one available on video.