Diff between FPGA and Microcontroller.

divzr0

Hey all, new to the forums around here.

Just have a quick question.· About 6 months ago my parents gave me a basic stamp kit by parallax, and I started messing around with it immediately.· Unforatunately I'm an engineering student and when I'm in class (now) I have absolutely no time to do anything else but my coursework.· Regardless, I have begun a couse in VHDL and we just started yesterday FPGA (Xilinx).· I was wondering if someone with some spare time could explain the differences.· I have a hard time understanding why I'm learning VHDL when things like microcontrollers can just as easily be programmed, and since I have a Pascal\C\C++ background, PBasic comes really easy to me....

Thanks for your time folks.

Cheers

[url=]\\divzr0[/url]

Paul Baker

The short story; they are two different levels of abstraction, like assembly and C. FPGAs are a lower level than processors. In a microprocessor a program utilizes predefined functional logic units such as add, In an FPGA a program defines the actual interconnects of the logic, IOW you're·constructing the functional logic units themselves. Finally a microprocessor is serial in nature, executing functions in a defined sequence. An FPGA is parallel in nature, each section is operating simultaneously.

Post Edited (Paul Baker) : 4/20/2005 6:31:23 AM GMT

Paul Baker

Read the first few pages of this document http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/DOC0737.PDF·it explains the different types of programmable logic architectures.

allanlane5

A properly programmed FPGA should be able to do a hardware intensive operation (like a sync pattern detect) faster than the equivalent microprocessor. The same applies to Fast Fourier Transforms, I believe, as well as any Neural Network application, and even perhaps UARTs.

Note FPGA's are so capable now that you can program a micro into part of an FPGA, and use the other parts for hardware activities.