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Altera_Forum
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11 years ago

FPGA or CPLD?

We have a design that we would like to fit in a CPLD or FPGA, we have extremely limited experience with both technologies, and need help to determine which technology and which part in the particular...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
11 years ago

Hi,

You can use a MAX3000A if you absolutely need 5v compatible I/O. Otherwise you can go with MAX II or MAX V. Pick the largest size part when you do the design setup in Quartus II (free web edition). After compilation you can see the percentage of resources used. You can change the project to a smaller device in the project settings (without recreating the project). Altera also just came out with MAX10 fpga (single chip solution). They are not as inexpensive as the older MAX devices though.

I think the older MAX3000A is not supported in the latest version of Quartus II (v14 or v14.1) so stay with v13 or so. I dunno about the MAX II or V because I've never used them.

I hope that helps.