The great thing about programmable logic is that you don't need your soldering iron to make changes. You can also put all your logic into one chip. If you can come up with a simple counter circuit that will do what you need you might as well do that but a CPLD is more flexible- it makes your hardware design like software design. I'm having a great time working with VHDL (a programming language to design digital logic) so I'm a bit partial to programmable logic right now.
SRAM is fairly easy to use. The timing can be a bit confusing because its asyncronous but it shouldn't be too bad.
If you want to see what working with CPLDs and FPGAs is like Xilinx has free design software for all their CPLDs and most of their FPGAs. Its called ISE Webpack and you can download it from their site.
SRAM is fairly easy to use. The timing can be a bit confusing because its asyncronous but it shouldn't be too bad.
If you want to see what working with CPLDs and FPGAs is like Xilinx has free design software for all their CPLDs and most of their FPGAs. Its called ISE Webpack and you can download it from their site.