Having scoured a few web sites and talked to a few people it appears that the Altera Tools (Quartus II Web Edition for the free version) was the way to go for beginners. Choosing the tool, of course, also decides the chipset one will be locked into. You can find a comparison between the Web edition and the Subscription Editions here. In addition to the tools being better one thing I found was that if you enable the “talkback” feature then the SignalTap II logic analyzer is also available with the free version. On the other hand, the Xilinx equivalent, ChipScope Pro, is only available for paying customers although you don’t need to have the paid version of their ISE Design Suite to use ChipScope Pro.

After installing the tools I got onto their online courses to learn about the tools. In general the two places to find course listings are here and here. The first course I sat for was “The Quartus II Software Design Series: Foundation“

Popularity: 12% [?]

Related Content

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback