Tools

About Tools

So you are interested in Programmable Logics, but you're confused with all the tools out there. What to use ? When it comes to FPGA/CPLD development, unfortunately one needs to choose a device vendor. The most known are Xilinx, Altera and Lattice/Vantis. The reason why you need to choose one of these is because the FPGA/CPLD these vendors make are "incompatible", and only they make the place&route (i.e. fitting) software. Once upon a time they also made their own internally developed "compilers". But all of these vendors now use a third party compilers and simulators. Altera and Xilinx bundles up compilers from Synopsys (FPGA express) or Exemplar (Leonardo Spectrum), and ModelSIm simulator. These are "OEM" versions and thus usually are "reduced strength" tools. Lattice bundles Synplify compiler from Synplicity. Among these 3 vendors, Altera is so far the only one who makes a version of their tool availalbe for FREE. Xilinx makes a web-based tools available, but one needs to have a constant web-connection. Fortunately, Xilinx offers a relatively low-cost "entry level" version of the tool. Lattice only has "full strength" version at very high cost. Lattice is not known for FPGA, but rather for CPLD. My recommendation is to download the FREE tools from Altera and get familiar with its interface. The weakness of this Altera tool is the simulation. It only offers a graphical entry simulator (i.e. no testbenches). This tools does have Verilog and VHDL compiler (though not the best). Most of the projects in this website will work with this tool. If you are interested in proper simulator, download ModelSIm from ModelTech. A proper simulator will allow you to run 'testbenches'.