I am a EE student in my sophomore year and lately came to know about VHDL and related technologies. I have completed my college course on "Digital Fundamentals" but am confused about how to approach my goal of learning Digital Designing on FPGA and further.

Pardon me if I sound like someone without enough knowledge to be here, but I would surely appreciate if someone gives me suggestion of how to approach in learning the HDL which can help me accomplish my end goals.

Thanks :)

My advice...

1) Pick up an inexpensive FPGA development board... Adafruit.com has the DE0-Nano for a bit under 100.00... If you prefer Xilinx, then check out Digilent's offerings... From a cost standpoint, I'd stay with something using a Spartan-3... If you're having trouble deciding, then it's been my experience that Xilinx ISE is a bit more difficult to get working... I'm in a Linux environment, though... If you're using Windows, you're life will be MUCH easier... The book I'm recommending in #3 will be best used with a Xilinx board (Spartan 3 Starter Board @ 169.00), but in the end, sorting out the differences will be a useful experience...

2) Decide which HDL you'd like to learn... Verilog or VHDL... I lean toward Verilog... I lean that way because I flipped a coin years ago, and Verilog is what I learned first... Eventually, I also picked up VHDL... You can do both... The most important thing is to choose one, and get started... Don't waste a lot of time deciding or trying to figure out which is best... They both have merits... They both have drawbacks... (I'm not inviting debate, in any case... ;-))

3) Pick up a copy of the relevant Pong Chu book... :-) He has versions for both Verilog and VHDL... If you choose to go with a Xilinx board, most of his examples are tailored for the Digilent Spartan-S3 Starter Board... Work through this book... Other folks will have differing opinions about this as well, I'm certain, but this book is pretty comprehensive...

So... You're looking at an investment of about, give or take, ~250.00... In my opinion, it'll be well worth it...

Thanks. Would surely do what you suggested. :)