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Learning FPGA can be an intimidating process, but it's also a highly rewarding one. In addition, the skills you learn during the process are going to be useful in a wide number of situations for sure. Here's some information about getting started on this journey into FPGA.

Starting Out

Electronics is a challenging field now and again, especially when you're first getting started. The key is to make sure you stick with it, however. This is because the truth is that it's a really enjoyable thing to be able to do. You definitely need to have the patience to get going with it, but the rewards are enormous. IN specific, FPGAs are like this as well. You just have to start small and have specific goals in order to get going on your road to understanding what you need to understand.

The recommendation is to start with an easy tutorial and to pick an easy project that will help you to feel accomplished after you've finished it. That way, you'll have a strong place to start from and you'll have the energy and interest to keep going. This is the key part of the whole thing. You need to feel like you've understood it to some degree, and built something fun that you are proud of in order to keep going further and further into the field and tackle harder and harder projects.

Defining FPGA

FPGAs are gates that can be changed to make any kind of circuit that you want. The possibilities are genuinely nearly endless. It's this flexibility that draws people to the field in the first place. This is why a lot of people go with FPGAs instead of many other options such as the classic ASICs. These days, important applications of FPGA's include so-called 'deep learning' or AI projects. The classic ASIC doesn't generally have the kind of flexibility needed to tackle these sorts of applications, at least not with the kind of versatility you get with an FPGA.

Motivation

One of the most critical parts of getting started in learning this field has to do with what motivates you to do it in the first place. One of the greatest ways to get motivated is to think about the applications for how the field can be used. Fortunately, in terms of FPGA programming, you are spoiled for choice when it comes to this particular question. For example, the field is used in cryptography, the encoding and decoding of messages. It's harder to get any more exciting than that. You could literally be helping to break important secret messages, or else make them in the first place.
It can also be used to help make ASIC prototypes, which can be interesting. Or, you could help make instruments for a wide number of fields including in the industrial field, the medical field, or for scientific purposes.

These gates are used quite often in space or for the military as well. So, if you wanted a career in helping put up spacecraft or other applications in space, so that you could tell other people about being involved in that, this is a possibility. Of course, there are the high-performance applications for computing. You could help with broadcasting applications, or in more traditional computing applications such as networking or processing packets.

Other Considerations

Another important thing to be aware of before you get started with FPGA's is something called RTL. This is short for "Register Transfer Level." It's a kind of behavioral modelling. It's a sort of code-like thing used for programming software. The RTL is data flow design, in other words. You will need to learn to make the RTL design and then convert it into the code that you want for HDL. Languages that you can use for this include Verilog and others.
Verilog itself is also something that you may need to understand. The important thing is to practice it and get a sense of how it works first. That way, you can use it more effectively. The only way to understand it is to check the tutorials and practice using it, but it's definitely an important part of the whole process that you can't really get along without using to at least some degree.

Tools Needed to Get Started

In order to really sink your teeth into this field, you will definitely need a few tools. You'll need the Xilinx webpack, but it is actually free after you register. Xilinx is a good chance for handling all of this as well. You will also need special downloader software for the board you got. It should be available for free from the manufacturer webpage, however. You will also need a text editor. People often recommend the Notepad++ option since it's free and pretty easy to understand.
Beyond that, you will need a good tutorial that will help you get going from step to step. Additionally, you'll need a project. IN other words, the tutorial should offer you a project that you can do while learning. This is because learning abstractly is often not helpful. This is especially the case when it comes to stuff like physical boards such as FPGA. You need to be able to see, handle, and experience what you're doing. You can't simply read about it, this won't actually help.
After this, the only thing you'll need is the perseverance to keep going. It's easy to get daunted at the beginning stages of learning something like this, but it's those who keep going no matter what that tend to end up with the best results. Just make sure that you pay attention to Xilinx FPGA from Directics and the other extra parts that go with the whole project. Don't give up and you'll definitely get to where you want to be in the end.