Electronics > Beginners

CPLD Starter questions

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chancs:
I am on a tight budget and want to learn more about CPLD (maybe FPGA later). Is there a good starter kit/dev board out there and which programmer should I buy.

So far I have only played around with ISE 14.7 and Quartus 18.1. Nothing fancy, just creates a project, few lines of codes and compile it. What I can tell is ISE seem to compile much faster and simpler to use.

james_s:
I use ISE and Quartus and have come to like Quartus better in most ways, but they both have similar abilities. Lots of cheap CPLD boards available on ebay and other Chinese sellers. If you want something a bit more powerful, the Cyclone II "mini board" FPGA boards are widely available for around $15 including a USB programming adapter. These are rather old parts at this point but still adequate to do some fairly impressive things.

This for example: http://searle.hostei.com/grant/Multicomp/

chancs:
The problem that I am having is I do not know which program is suitable. Definitely, I wouldn't be able to afford Xilinx or Altera official programmer. I know there are clones selling on eBay at a fraction of its price, but do they compatible with vendor's IDE? Or is that a programmer that can program both Xilinx and Altera?

Ice-Tea:
The lines between CPLD and FPGA are really blurred nowadays. I'm not sure if it's worth making the distinction.

Quite a lot of FPGA dev boards have a USB interface that can program the device. Nice example:

https://tinyfpga.com/

(the BX version)

The papilio is another:

http://store.gadgetfactory.net/papilio-one-250k-low-cost-xilinx-fpga-dev-board/

Terasic has some great stuff as well, a bit more expensive but really nice and jam-packed:

https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=218&No=1021

amspire:
I learnt FPGA's on this board:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000126853309.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000126952717.html

It is an older Cyclone 1 chip but it is a very cheap board and it is pretty powerful.

I think the last development system that supported this chip is Altera Quartus 11 13.0sp1

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