drkohler said:
Well I can't speak past programming GALs and PALs and EEEProms but my guess is in an introductory lab, that is exactly what you will see, a bunch of leds lighting up, telling you what went wrong or not with your fpga. It's not like you are learning to program an fpga that runs a microscope on mars (what my colleagues did, fascinating stuff to watch being developed). |
Well, blinking lights was our task, too - in the first week. We had to write a full fpu on FPGAs with a serial interface to get data to the board and back. It was very hard to begin with but in the end it was a lot of fun. Thing is FPGAs are performance beasts but lack floating-point operations. Our fpu could run any operation (add, sub, mult, divide) on full 50MHz of the Xilinx-board, conversions didn't even have a clocked data-path ;)
