Ask HN: How to get into programming ASICs, FPGAs?

2 pointsgreener_grass2 comments

It feels like for web, game development, machine learning there are lots of resources. But for specialized chips, not so much.

How does one even get started?

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Step1: Grab an FPGA devboard (for learning get a well supported big name one from AMD/Xilinx or Intel/Altera. Open source FPGA toolchains sound good only as long as you don't have to touch them).

Step2: Follow tutorials to make an LED blink. (There are quite a lot of VHDL and Verilog resources, both as books, and on the internet too. While things evolve, they don't change as fast as for example the JS ecosystem - e.g. most 10 years old VHDL books have perfectly usable and valid information, cover-to-cover)

Step3: Implement your own soft CPU from scratch.

After that you are done. (Add intermediary steps between the last steps, if you wish. Most likely hobby projects.)

I have yet to really get started learning FPGAs myself, but I hear that [1] nand2tetris is a good resource for learning.

[1] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

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