PLDs and Altera

[Steven Curtin]

At 02:25 PM 2/26/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Also I am curious what the current investment cost is for an Altera
>development system. I used this at my old job and it was quite powerful
>- draw the schematic and program it into the chip.
>I think we use it where I'm currently at - unfortunately I'm not in
>hardware development this time around, but I can probably find out how
>much a setup is.

The Altera and other setups can be much more convenient with schematic
entry and such, but this comes at a price.  Quite often the development
systems for a particular mgfr only work with their chips.  There are
generalized compilers like synopsis etc but they're really expensive,
>$10k.  There's a couple of C-like languages that FPGA and chip developers
use called Verilog and VHDL and they're even more expensive and tend to run
on Sun workstations.

After doing some checking around the Philips board seemed like an
affordable and convenient way to get my feet wet.  The PLD that the eval
board is based around is also expensive, around $80.  JDR has some
development systems in their catalog as well I think.  

Steve C

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Steven Curtin  
http://www.emf.org/people_curtin.html
Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs Innovations
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