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Sceadwian said:Not a lot of people here have experiance with VHDL, you might want to look for a VHDL forum as it's really more along the lines of a programming language than something directly involving electronics. Many users have trouble with PIC code and VHDL puts that to shame many times over.
Optikon said:Remember, VHDL describes hardware - that means logic gates & flipflops. The only level lower than that is at the transistor level.
Styx said:kind of. It provides a language slightly higher then assembler to realise boolean very easily, How it actually gets implemented is different. only very basic CPLD's actually get the VHDL synth downto a bitcode that describes actual logic layout (w.r.t. NAND/NOR grid). FPGA's are different and have micro-cells, you may code a up-down counter made out of flip-flops but what actually gets put down is some complex lookup table that clocks at a certain rate.
Sceadwian said:Optikon, Both PIC's and AVR's can have their code tweaked down to the clock rate of the chip, I can't speak for other architectures. There are caveats though where with an FPGA you just tell it what your timing is and it synthesizes around that. A good ASM programmer can do some really low level control of the timing on a micro controller. On a price per pound sort of scale micro controllers win, also for ease of implementation, especially to a novice micro controllers are significantly simpler.
Sceadwian said:Out of curiosity, what specifically do you use FPGA's for Optikon? I've always been interested in them because they're basically the ultimate in flexibility. Been playing around with Xilinx free tools but don't have any plans to buy a board or write any real code anytime soon, as there's really nothing I want to do right now that I can't do with a micro controller.