On 2006-09-02, Ali <sadatakhavi.ali@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1-If I start with CPLD (XC9572 the training kit has it ) can I later
> work with FPGA (Spartan 2,3) ?

Tim gave you a great answer.  I just want to add that a small CPLD like
the XC9572 is very small compared to an FPGA.  The '72' is 72 flops.
The smallest Spartan 3E has over 2000.  I didn't appreciate this gap
when I built my first proto board with a CPLD.

> 3-Are ISE & VHDL have much defference ?

Not that much.

By the way, have you seen the Spartan 3 starter kit?

http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xebiz/designResources/ip_product_details.jsp?key=HW-SPAR3E-SK-US&sGlobalNavPick=PRODUCTS&sSecondaryNavPick=BOARDS

-- 
Ben Jackson AD7GD
<ben@ben.com>
http://www.ben.com/

Ali wrote:

> I like to start FPGA  but I have access to a CPLD traning kit .
> 
> I would like to know :
> 
> 1-If I start with CPLD (XC9572 the training kit has it ) can I later
> work with FPGA (Spartan 2,3) ?
> 2-Does these two have much defferent Hardware design ?
> 3-Are ISE & VHDL have much defference ?
> 
Look at it this way:

What you need to know to do good work with FPGAs, CPLDs, or ASIC, for 
that matter, is a firm grounding in _logic_ design.  You can get that 
from CPLDs, or from big conglomerations of 74xx parts, for that matter 
(although I don't know of any Verilog-to-74xx synthesizers).  You'll run 
into some detail differences when you move to a different technology 
(such as an FPGA), but you'll still be doing _logic_ design.

-- 

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

Ali wrote:

> 1-If I start with CPLD (XC9572 the training kit has it ) can I later
> work with FPGA (Spartan 2,3) ?

Yes.

> 2-Does these two have much defferent Hardware design ?

Yes, they use different low-level blocks to implement a design.

> 3-Are ISE & VHDL have much defference ?

As long as you use VHDL, only, without special entities of the hardware
(like block RAM or DCM), it compiles for every CPLD and FPGA, if there are
sufficient number of logic elements to synthesize it.

-- 
Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de

I like to start FPGA  but I have access to a CPLD traning kit .

I would like to know :

1-If I start with CPLD (XC9572 the training kit has it ) can I later
work with FPGA (Spartan 2,3) ?
2-Does these two have much defferent Hardware design ?
3-Are ISE & VHDL have much defference ?