Microcontrollers

[beenuseren]

Hi,

Whats the difference between an FPGA and a microcontroller?

 

[Oznog]

Everything... look at Wikipedia or whatever.

 

[philba]

Is it just my imagination or has the level of posting with utterly vague titles and easily to google answers gone up dramatically in the past few weeks? I thought we'd be spared at least until september...

 

[Matt(Pic progger)]

OK, I am going to play Devils advocate here...... Now fair enough, "beenuseren" may have asked an "obvious" question, but we all had to start somewhere, the guy (PC correctness=person) has only posted 8 posts, is obviously a newbie (possibly!).

The quickest way to get rid of "new blood" on any forum and to piss people off before they really get started, is, imho, to give sarcastic answers to simple, direct questions, if you don't want to answer his question, then don't! It's easy, no-one will flame you for it (unlike the treatment I am likely to get for this post!).

Check out this guys other posts... here is an example....
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/impedence.22518/

He asks a straight forward question, and gets a decent answer, after which he thanks the members of the forum, and has probably learnt a lot, and more importantly, left the post for others to read/learn from (i am still going thro that post!... my head hurts!).

I know that reading some posts can be annoying, my pet hate is "I have a project/thesis to do, by tommorow, so give me the code and explination for it now, NOW". But I bite my tounge, *mostly*

Have you considered that maybe this person HAS looked on google etc, and doesn't understand the explanation(s) OK, so he could have said that....

I can remeber the 1st time I tried to get my head around interupts on a PIC, just It was a nigtmare for me, and a little bit of explanation other than the Microchip blurb, would have saved me alot of time!

Anyway, rant over, bring on the flames! Be gentle with me, I do see your "not again" point of view, but by looking at this guys other posts he seems keen to ask and keen to learn, lets not scare him of by being too grumpy

 

[Marks256]

Well said! I am glad someone else feels the same way. It happened to me too. But i guess it's tough love? It almost makes you wonder if any other forum would be more supportive?

 

[Papabravo]

I think you may find that this forum is hardly unique. There are numerous helpful suggestions on what you can do to avoid having people treat you with a degree of contempt and disdain. It seems to revolve around the ability to communicate not just the problem at hand but your attempts at solving the problem before posting.

This community is a valuable resource, but one that can be overused. If the newbies are put off by their treatment, consider the people who abandon the community because they can't get people to do some simple things to help themselves. How you perceive and are perceived by the community is a two way street. If you want to have access to the community you should at least respect the manifest and reasonable ground rules.

 

[Marks256]

This community is a valuable resource, but one that can be overused. If the newbies are put off by their treatment, consider the people who abandon the community because they can't get people to do some simple things to help themselves. How you perceive and are perceived by the community is a two way street. If you want to have access to the community you should at least respect the manifest and reasonable ground rules.

Another very good point.

 

[Oznog]

I'm not sarcastic. It just isn't worth it to spend time making an explanation when Wikipedia has a far more thorough explanation that I could ever do.

Now people who say "Somebody make up a project for me please its for my final grade" and "Please do my homework for me"... those guys are begging for the sarcasm.

 

[Marks256]

Yes, those people need the sarcasm. It builds character. You could at least say it nicer? Or post a link. Who know. I myself am too lazy to do that, so it would be hypocritical to really suggest that. Kick back and relax.

 

[Mike - K8LH]

I'm not sarcastic. It just isn't worth it to spend time making an explanation when Wikipedia has a far more thorough explanation that I could ever do.

Then it probably wasn't worth your time to respond at all, maybe?

 

[samcheetah]

okay, how about answering the question

well, you see FPGAs and microcontrollers are really two different animals. a microcontroller consists of an ALU, registers, stack, program counter, data memory and program memory etc. the instructions are stored in the program memory which are fetched one by one and stored in an instruction decoder each time the program counter increments by one. the instruction decoder decodes the instruction and accordingly the ALU, registers and program counter etc are used. in addition to that microcontrollers also have timers and UARTs. and on microcontrollers like the PIC and AVR etc you will also find analog components like ADCs etc but thats a completely different story.

now, FPGAs consists of gates (lots of gates) and each FPGA manufacturer has a different architechture of their FPGAs and i wont go into the details of all the FPGAs from each manufacturer. but basically FPGAs have LUTs (look up tables) and if you have studied a logic design course you would know that a LUT can implement any logic function. no matter what you write in HDL (VHDL or VerilogHDL) it will be synthesized to fit into the 3-input or 4-input or 5-input LUTs. the LUTs also have interconnections between each other using the interconnect matrix of the FPGAs to allow for even bigger logic functions. now, FPGAs will also have BlockRAMs and Clock Managers etc but you will learn that once you get into FPGAs. and by the way, you can implement a microcontroller in an FPGA, infact a full blown microprocessor system can be implemented in an FPGA.

i hope that helps

 

[Matt(Pic progger)]

Phew, I got of lightly....... so far
Oh and thanks samcheetah, I 4got to answer the poor guys question!

I must admit that FPGA's and micros are really begining to "blur" the edges, so to speak, as you say the cypress devices now have 8051(i think) microcontroller support built in! But on the other hand, micro's now have a lot of "add in's" like serial/usb/ic2/can etc etc than used to be (could be) implimented by FGPA's........ it's a strange world.

Oh 1 last thing, as far as I can make out, the belief (protocol?) seems to be, if you code for FGPA's then you look down on micros...... and if you code for micros..... I think your ahead of me Well that's in my experience anyway

I would love to have a go at PGA's well actually simple devices such as GAL's would be a good start, but I seem to get a mental "block" when I look at the code! Funny I have no problems with PIC's and have been using these for years, anyone else have this problem? Or is it just me?

 

[beenuseren]

Well, I am a graduate in Electrical engineering and I have two to three electronic subjects. so I know little about digital electronics. Right now, with the help of the net, I am learning about EDA tools. In this process, I couldn't understand FPGA clearly from Wikipedia and I posed the question in this forum.

Sarcasm really hampers the confidence. There is always a way to say anything politely in a direct way, unless the other person is really troubling.

Thanks for all who have supported me and gave me the information. Now I could understand FPGA little better.

From what I understood FPGA can be used to prototype ASIC before its final production. Its like a breadboard where you can prototype the physical design of an IC or a microcontroller or or a system on chip. Am I right?

thanks

 

[phalanx]

From what I understood FPGA can be used to prototype ASIC before its final production. Its like a breadboard where you can prototype the physical design of an IC or a microcontroller or or a system on chip. Am I right?

thanks

That pretty much sums it up.

 

[samcheetah]

yes, thats how FPGAs started their life. In the beginning FPGAs were just used to implement the glue logic functions between a DSPs/ASICs. but now pretty much everything is done on FPGAs. complete one chip solutions that werent imaginable within a little time and little NRE cost, are possible only due to FPGAs. FPGAs are now at the centre stage!!!!!!!

but there is one problem with FPGAs, they consume alot of power as compared to ASICs. but even that is changing and with FPGAs like Virtex-5 that are built with a 65nm process things are getting even better for FPGAs.

if you have any more questions, then feel free to ask