The Arduino platform and bare microcontrollers are good ways to get started in developing embedded systems. But the way of the future is clearly CPLD and FPGA architecture. These devices are not simply a new type of chip, but a new and interesting design and development frontier. Their programs are developed using several methods, including schematic capture, and the Verilog and VHDL programming languages.
Each manufacturer has their own unique IDE for their chips, which is not open source. For example, if you have a Xilinx development board such as the Spartan-3A FPGA evaluation kit or the Coolrunner II CPLD board, then you would be using Xilinx’s free Webpack ISE design software.
Our soon to be released Bus Blaster v2 uses the Xilinx CoolRunner-II XC2C32A CPLD chip, as will some of our future offerings. Check out our CoolRunner-II CPLD quick start.
Xilinx has a number of free online training courses covering many aspects of FPGA circuit design and program development using their ISE software. A separate group of tutorials covers CPLD design. (Start with “Creating a New Design.”) Learning PLD development now will increase your use and development of future open source products.
Nice post! I’m really getting into CPLDs. The votlage translation makes stuff a snap. Desiging is as easy as drawing a schematic and synthesizing the design.
My favorite way to use small CPLDs is as a front end for a microcontroller or other chip (like the Bus Blaster). The CPLD is like a reprogrammable set of logic chips attached to the micro, you can reconfigure paths, implement fixes, etc.
The really cool part is that public domain software is available to make just about any microcontroller able to program a CPLD (or FPGA) with minimal fuss (just tailor a few pin locations). So devices can upgrade and correct the logic between a microcontroller and another part. Like a reprogrammable circuit board. So cool!
I bet eventually even the Bus Pirate will have a CPLD. It would have to be 5volts tolerant, so it is a challenge, but I think it would be a killer front-end.
FPGA’s have been here since the mid-80s, they are useful and are great for low volume designs. They get used in things like space systems where qualifying parts is expensive, but I don’t think they are “the future” and fixed hardware is “the past” the approaches are complementary. If all you need is a buffer you should use a buffer not a CPLD, if you might need a buffer now but might need something else later then you should use a CPLD.
You might find this interesting: http://majolsurf.net/wordpress/
:)
Perfect !!!.. very interesting for small projects
@brian – i agree 99%, but cplds are such today that they can be a cheaper solution than a buffer. We used 5 buffer chips on the bus blaster, when we switched to a cpld our manufacturing cost dropped by 5 bucks at the low level.