Hi again. Good point about doing what you do to be better at what you do... I've worked with a few engineers who are naturals at what they do, and don't seem to need to get theirselves any extra training. I"m not one of those guys. I have to go through the process and get some 'hands on' experience to be able to perform. One reason I started working with the kits is because most of my experience was in ASIC's, and I wanted to make the change to FPGA's ( because there are more jobs and it's more interesting to be able to 'see' what your designs are doing ) I am far more comfortabel with Verilog, though VHDL is probably a superior, though much more complicated, language. I also work with SystemC for simulations. System Verilog is coming along too, and I"m gonna need to hunker down and learn it soon. My problem in working in multiple languages, as well as a number of programming languages, is trying to remember all the syntax. I make use of many references, some of which I made on my own, to get me through. Wish I had a better memeory for them though.
When I started the new job last July, the learning curve was so steep that I didn't think I had any bandwidth left at the end of the day. Now things are beginning to settle down, so I think I can take on a couple more challenges. I've been working with a Spartan-3 board that I bought online from Digilent. It's a nice, fully featured board, if just a little obsolete -- the Spartan, not the other stuff. How are you able to work with Microblaze? When I checked, it required a license, and that was pretty expensive. Are you using the 1-month free license? I figured it would take me a month just to get started, so I never went down that road. Alter offers a program that allows you to use their IP in a 'teathered' mode; it will work as long as your board is teathered to a PC, otherwise, it will work on a time-limited baises, usually 1 hour and then you have to re-configure your device. Let me know becuase I'd like to play with the Microblaze if I can. I see it uses the Eclipse development environment, which is the same as Altera uses, so that would be good.