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Rei want to know the defrient of paralle and serial devies
by Unknown on Feb 3, 2007
Not available!
what is the defrient of parallel and serial devies ----- Original Message ----- From: John Sheahan jrsheahan at o...> To: cores at o... Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 20:41:17 +1100 Subject: Re: [oc] Real newbie questions


On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 11:46:03AM +0800, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> a flow from schematic to vhdl to fpga would make little

sense.
>
> Well it makes sense to "Schematic people"... I look at VHDL

and although being
> a programmer in every language from assembly to Java, VHDL is

obscure or
> should I say "hard to get my head around".


verilog is cleaner and more concise for me. But this is a religious
issue.
Yes - RTL is different to schematic. It takes some head
rearrangement.
But its time well spent.
Compare a 32 bit adder in schematic and rtl and tell me which is
more
obvious. Or a state machine. Than change the adder to 48 bits..
I suspect schematic adherents for digital design are now few and
far
between - particularly in those doing any regular not-tiny design.
The which-language wars are very much ongoing though :)




Also consider the simulation testbench. Once you are used to using
the
same language for the TB as for the code - you won't want to go
back
to schematics and a separate sim language.
Actually thats _almost_ the same language. You use a very different
style in the TB. That does not have to synthesize efficiently.

>
> In a schematic - you have to instantiate paricular devies

- chosen
> from a library. What library did you use? thats the

device you have
> targetted. Perhaps there are several sized members

availave.
>
> I have several choice. For Altera and Xilinx there are

libraries for different
> families, such as Spartan II(E), but there is also a more

"generic" CUPL
> library, which is a smaller subset (which does fine for me).


I have no idea how CUPL has changed - but it was pretty limited 15
years ago. And seems to hve become much less common.

Reusing design modules is nice. I generally don't know what I will
reuse. And over time the family changes. I have plenty of old
xilinx 3000 - family schematics that are completely obselete.
Its not the logic thats old - its the format.


>
> ypu my be able to get a structural gate vhdl netlist out

- thats
> exuivilant to disassembling compiled code. May be useful

for debug
> - but not very useful to port to a new architecture.
>
> Write VHDL or Verilog RTL with any decent editor (with

support for the
> language) Synthesize with the free (beer) tools from

Xilinx or Altera.
> I don't think schematic capture for fpga is of much

relevance any more.
>
> I will make it a shot. I will also try the synthesize tools

and see how they
> react to the VHDL/CUPL netlist (and half a dozen FPGA related

formats) that
> Protel outputs.
>


if its structural (ie connect this gate to that flop - there is
nothing
for the synthesis tool to do. You have _chosen_ the gate.
RTL can be targetted. It may work - post a fragment of the CUPL
vhdl output.
Its possible for you and/or the tools to produce either.
GAte level coding probably should only happen now to wring the last
gate
or ps out of a specific technology. And even then its often hard to
justify.


> Those tools will also allow you to fit the design into

any of the
> ranges of parts they make. 192 bits of fifo is tiny -

will go into
> most any fpga and some cpld's. (unless you are doing

horrible
> clocking)

>
> "Clocking"? Well, the building blocks are Serial-to-Parallel

and
> Parallel-to-Serial shifters. Separate async input and output

clocks. (Input
> is dictated by the A/D converter at a continous 1Mbps stream,

while the
> output is to CPU over SPI Master at 2-5Mbps, when buffer is

filled.)

A fifo - particularly fall-thru fifo can have very odd clocking.
The more clocks the more issues you will have in a bunch of areas.
And the harder the STA is . Sometimes you have to do more than

one
clock, but its usually better to avoid that in any single module.

sounds like an application for block ram in a xilinx or altera.



>
> Anyway. Thanks for the advice. I'll get some books on the

subject as well.
> A search on freashmeat.net for "VHDL Editor" only reveals

ChipVault for
> organization management, and "j" for syntax highlighting (The

Kate editor in
> Linux KDE 3.0 has VHDL and Verilog highlighting).
> I'll do more extensive searches, but are there any better

tools (beyond syntax
> highlighting) available??


I use xemacs (or just emacs) with syntax highlighting, punctuation
aware
indenting and especially auto filling in of port lists and
instantiations. But then emacs is also in the religion category...



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