Need advices on FPGA for telecom apps

Ok, thanks again for the info.

Up to now I've never used the PLLs of my FPGA but it looks like I really need to learn how to use them :)

I'm now searching the "best buy" board among the DSP development kits of Altera; as you say I should have a raw idea of the resources required by the internal design of my project; since I have the project written as a MATLAB script, I'd first need to convert it to a Simulink model however.

AFAIK in fact, most telecommunication projects are developed using Simulink and then the Simulink => HDL coder => Quartus II chain. Could anyone confirm/deny this?

Another question which arises is: how to efficiently debug the board? For example if I create a program which takes data from the A/D, elaborates it and then stores it into memory, how can I read from a computer that memory, to test if the processing was ok?

Reading e.g. the "Cyclone II DSP Development Board reference manual", I see that for this scope, there are basically:

- the USB-blaster cable connector (JTAG): in my DE1 board I never managed to use that for debugging, only for programming. From the reference manual it seems it's possible to use it as a general-purpose FPGA<->PC channel up to 1Mbps, instancing a specific IP core. Is it a good solution (i.e. something used in practice) for e.g. inspecting the board's memory contents?

- the Mictor connector: this seems to be useful only for logic analyzer usage...

- ASI connector: this one seems dedicated to programming only.

Thanks again for any precious hints!

Francesco